juliensimon/launch-vehicles

Launch Vehicles Database

Part of the Orbital Mechanics Datasets collection on Hugging Face.

Complete database of orbital and suborbital launch vehicles — 210 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.

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

Note: Wikidata coverage varies — some vehicles lack physical specs or payload data. Columns with <5% data coverage are automatically dropped during pipeline processing.

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)
payload_leo_kg	float	Payload capacity to LEO (kg)

Additional columns (diameter, mass, first_flight, etc.) appear when Wikidata coverage exceeds 5%.

Quick stats

• 210 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()

# List all vehicles by country
print(df[["name", "country", "manufacturer"]].head(20))

# Vehicles with known height
if "height_m" in df.columns:
    tall = df.dropna(subset=["height_m"]).nlargest(10, "height_m")
    print(tall[["name", "country", "height_m"]])

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)