juliensimon/launch-vehicles

Launch Vehicles Database

Part of the Orbital Mechanics Datasets collection on Hugging Face.

Complete database of orbital and suborbital launch vehicles — 209 rockets and boosters from 11 countries, sourced from Wikidata.

Dataset description

From the German V-2 through the Saturn V to the Falcon 9 and Starship, launch vehicles have defined humanity's access to space. This dataset covers every orbital and suborbital launch vehicle recorded in Wikidata, including historical rockets, active workhorses, and vehicles under development.

Each entry includes physical dimensions (height, diameter, liftoff mass), payload capacity to low Earth orbit (LEO) and geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), first and last flight dates, number of stages, operational status, manufacturer, and country of origin.

This enables analysis of global launch capability, rocket engineering evolution over decades, national space programme comparisons, and payload capacity trends across generations of vehicles.

Sourced from Wikidata's structured knowledge base (class Q697175: space launch vehicle), maintained by the WikiProject Spaceflight community.

Schema

Column	Type	Description
wikidata_id	string	Wikidata entity ID (e.g. Q697175)
name	string	Vehicle name
manufacturer	string	Manufacturer organisation
country	string	Country of origin
height_m	float	Total height (metres)
diameter_m	float	Core diameter (metres)
mass_kg	float	Liftoff mass (kg)
payload_leo_kg	float	Payload capacity to LEO (kg)
payload_gto_kg	float	Payload capacity to GTO (kg)
first_flight	string	Date of first flight (YYYY-MM-DD)
last_flight	string	Date of last flight if retired (YYYY-MM-DD)
num_stages	int	Number of stages
status	string	Operational status (active/retired/in development)

Quick stats

• 209 launch vehicles from 11 countries
• 0 active, 0 retired
• Tallest vehicle: Long March 10 (90.0 m)
• Heaviest LEO payload: Delta IV Heavy (28,370 kg)
• Top countries: United States (99), Soviet Union (14), United Kingdom (6), Russia (5), People's Republic of China (2)

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/launch-vehicles", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

# Active vehicles by country
active = df[df["status"].str.lower() == "active"]
print(active["country"].value_counts().head(10))

# Heaviest LEO payload capacity
top_leo = df.nlargest(10, "payload_leo_kg")[["name", "country", "payload_leo_kg"]]
print(top_leo)

# Vehicles by first flight decade
df["decade"] = (df["first_flight"].str[:4].astype(float) // 10 * 10).astype("Int64")
print(df["decade"].value_counts().sort_index())

# Height vs payload correlation
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
subset = df.dropna(subset=["height_m", "payload_leo_kg"])
plt.scatter(subset["height_m"], subset["payload_leo_kg"])
plt.xlabel("Height (m)")
plt.ylabel("LEO Payload (kg)")
plt.title("Rocket Height vs Payload Capacity")
plt.show()

Data source

Wikidata SPARQL endpoint. Launch vehicles identified as instances of Q697175 (space launch vehicle) and its subclasses. Data is community-curated by WikiProject Spaceflight.

Update schedule

Quarterly (January, April, July, October). Re-run manually to pick up newly added vehicles.

Related datasets

• space-missions — Crewed and robotic space missions
• launch-log — McDowell orbital launch log
• spacecraft-database — Spacecraft catalogue

Pipeline

Source code: juliensimon/space-datasets

Support

If you find this dataset useful, please give it a ❤️ on the dataset page and share feedback in the Community tab! Also consider giving a ⭐️ to the space-datasets repo.

Citation

@dataset{launch_vehicles,
  author = {Simon, Julien},
  title = {Launch Vehicles Database},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/launch-vehicles},
  note = {Sourced from Wikidata (CC0)}
}

License

CC0-1.0 (Wikidata content is public domain)