An opinionated analysis of orbital launch failures from 1957 to 2025. We catalogued every public failure, tagged the root cause, and found the same seven patterns keep killing missions — decade after decade.
We tagged every failure by root cause. These seven patterns account for nearly every orbital launch failure in history.
The engine lights, runs for a while, then underperforms or dies. Turbopump seizure, injector erosion, combustion instability, or simple propellant exhaustion.
The rocket flies perfectly — in the wrong direction. Software bugs, sensor failures, IMU drift, or flight computer crashes send the vehicle off-course.
The handoff between stages fails. Explosive bolts misfire, fairings don't jettison, interstage adapters collide with the upper stage, or ullage motors don't fire.
The vehicle breaks apart under aerodynamic loads, thermal stress, or resonance vibration. Max-Q is the killing field.
Fuel leaks, helium bottle failures, cryo-loading errors, or pressurization system collapses. The plumbing kills you before the engine ever fires.
Inverted sensor installation, wrong unit conversion, skipped checklist step, or test data left in flight software. The rocket works as designed — the design was wrong.
No hardware breaks. A timing bug, integer overflow, race condition, or bad state machine transition kills the mission from the flight computer.
The uncomfortable truth: the same seven patterns have killed rockets since 1957. New entrants don't fail in novel ways — they rediscover the same failure modes their predecessors hit decades ago. The difference between a company that survives its failures and one that doesn't isn't engineering talent. It's whether they built a culture that treats near-misses as data, not luck.
Every catalogued orbital launch failure. Search, filter, sort. Click any column header to sort.
| Year ▼ | Rocket | Payload | Root Cause | What Happened |
|---|
Rockets don't fail from one thing. They fail from a chain of small things that individually seem harmless.
These mistakes have been made, documented, fixed, forgotten, and then made again across decades and companies.
The spec says the strut holds 10,000 lbs. But the actual strut on the vehicle was never tested. Acceptance testing of individual flight hardware catches the supplier defect, the bad weld, the contaminated batch.
Code that's "flight-proven" on one vehicle gets reused on a new vehicle with different flight dynamics, different sensors, or different timing requirements. The code is correct — for the old context.
Post-failure investigations routinely find that warning signs existed in the data from previous flights. Anomalies were noted, flagged, discussed — then accepted as nominal because the mission succeeded anyway.
It sounds too dumb to be real, but inverted sensors, swapped connectors, and metric/imperial unit mismatches have destroyed rockets worth hundreds of millions. Process and QA failures at the integration level.
Redundancy only works if the backup follows a different failure path. Running the same software on both computers, using the same supplier for both sensors, or routing both cables through the same conduit creates the illusion of redundancy.
The rate dropped as the industry matured — then new entrants reset the clock.
The 2010s saw more new launch vehicle companies than any decade since the 1960s. SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit, Astra, Firefly — each had to learn the hard way that rockets don't care about your funding round. The 2020s trend is improving, partly because the survivors internalized the lesson: iterate fast, but take anomalies seriously.
This database was compiled from public sources including Encyclopedia Astronautica, Jonathan McDowell's Launch Log, NASA mishap reports, ESA inquiry board findings, and SpaceX public updates. Root-cause categories are our editorial classification based on published investigation findings. Where investigations are still pending or where causes overlap, we used our best judgment and noted it. This is a living page — we update it as new failures occur and as investigation results are published.
Scope: Orbital launch attempts only. Suborbital flights, missile tests, and upper-stage/spacecraft failures after successful orbit insertion are excluded unless the failure directly relates to the launch vehicle. Entries from before 1990 are sampled (not exhaustive) to show pattern continuity.
Last updated: June 2025 · Maintained by: Lasting Apps