How many rockets have exploded?

No agency keeps a single tally of "exploded rockets," partly because not every failure ends in an explosion: some vehicles fall into the sea intact, others are destroyed on order of the flight safety officer, and others simply leave their payload in a useless orbit. Independent catalogs that track every orbital launch attempt since Sputnik count more than 6,500 liftoffs and place the overall success rate above 90%, which implies several hundred total or partial failures accumulated over nearly seventy years.

The statistics are heavily skewed toward the early years. Between 1957 and 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union were learning to build launch vehicles, nearly one in three attempts failed. By the 1970s reliability already hovered around 90%, and today mature vehicles exceed 97%. Current failures fall into two categories: the first flights of a new rocket, often lost by design, and launch vehicles from startups with little accumulated experience.

Some accidents are part of collective memory. The Soviet N1 failed in all four of its attempts between 1969 and 1972; the second destroyed the pad in one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded. The Challenger, in 1986, broke apart 73 seconds after liftoff due to a failure in a joint on the solid rocket booster. The first Ariane 5, in 1996, self-destructed because of a software error. More recently, Starship's tests have normalized the loss of vehicles as a development method: SpaceX accepts the destruction of prototypes in exchange for learning faster.