Countries sending people to orbit doubled, from 10 to 21

Claim types Fact · Interpretation

Researcher catalogue (GCAT), not a government source: Jonathan C. McDowell, Jonathan's Space Pages, human spaceflight data, astronauts list (planet4589.org/space/astro/tsv/astro.tsv) and rides list (planet4589.org/space/astro/tsv/rides.tsv), both updated 7 Nov 2026, read live from planet4589.org through the progrss vault's publisher fetch. Licence CC BY 4.0: data from GCAT (J. McDowell, planet4589.org/space/gcat). What it measures: countries with at least one citizen on an orbital human spaceflight launched in each five-year period (progrss calculation: every ride in the rides list matched to the traveller's citizenship as GCAT records it in the astronauts list). Suborbital flights (Blue Origin New Shepard, Virgin Galactic) are left out: with them, people of 38 countries flew in 2021–25, many of them private passengers. 2016–20 (10): United States, Russia, China, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Belarus, United Arab Emirates. 2021–25 (21): the same 10 plus 11 newcomers: Saudi Arabia (Ax-2, 2023, Saudi Space Commission), Turkey (Ax-3, 2024, Turkish Space Agency), Sweden (Ax-3, 2024, ESA), Israel (Ax-1, 2022, private), Denmark (Crew-7, 2023, ESA), India (Ax-4, 2025, ISRO), Poland (Ax-4, 2025, ESA), Hungary (Ax-4, 2025, HUNOR programme), Malta, Norway and Australia (Fram2, 2025, private). Every newcomer flew on SpaceX's Crew Dragon (company as a marker of who launches for whom, §4.10; no ranking of firms). Seven newcomers' flyers were sponsored by a government or agency (derived from GCAT's sponsor field); four were private. Citizenship is GCAT's coding: Belarus is counted in both periods for Oleg Novitskiy, a Roscosmos cosmonaut GCAT lists as a Belarusian citizen, and in 2024 Marina Vasilevskaya; Malta for Chun Wang (born in China). Map value: people of that citizenship flown to orbit in 2021–25 (US 41, Russia 25, China 25, Japan 7). Some newcomers flew a citizen before 2016 (Saudi Arabia 1985, India 1984, Poland 1978, Hungary 1980, Israel 2003, Sweden 2006, Denmark 2015): the count is of countries flying someone in each period, not of firsts. 2026 to date (not counted): Canada flew on Artemis II. UNOOSA and ESA publish no count of astronauts by country, so no cross-check against them was possible. The last clause of the third takeaway is Interpretation.