= ASTRONAUTICAL EVOLUTION =

Manned Spaceflight Statistics

55 years of men and women in space

On this year’s anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering orbit of the Earth, we publish bar charts showing manned spaceflight statistics over the first 55 years of space travel.

The three key indexes I have chosen are:

• Man-days spent in space on orbital flights per calendar year
• Number of launches to orbit per calendar year
• Number of astronaut seats to orbit per year.

Note the following features:

• The collapses in activity following the Apollo 1 and Soyuz 1 disasters in early 1967, the Challenger disaster in early 1986 and the Columbia disaster in early 2003 are clearly shown.
• Time spent in orbit shows a broad peak in the 1990s thanks to operations with the Space Shuttle and on Mir, and another in the past decade due to the ISS being manned with a crew of six.
• The number of launches to orbit peaked in 1985, then collapsed due to the Challenger disaster, and has not yet recovered to its 1985 level, let alone surpassed it.
• The number of astronauts carried to orbit peaked in the same year, and has likewise not yet recovered. Since the retirement of the Shuttle the numbers flying to space annually have been extremely low, less than a quarter of their 1985 peak.

It should be clear that no spacefaring civilisation worthy of the name can even begin to be constructed until all three charts show sustainable growth.

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