The coast where rockets go south
Vandenberg has made 896 orbital launch attempts in GCAT's log, and 838 succeeded. It's California's launch site, and its geography suits polar orbits: launches go south over the Pacific, so satellites reach polar orbit without crossing land until Antarctica.
2025 was a record with 66 launches, 64 of them SpaceX's. 2026 has already beaten it, with 67 through October 16, 2026 against 51 at the same point in 2025.
Launches per year
Launches by month in 2025
Pads and launch complexes
The busiest pads over the last five years.
Which rockets
Rockets launched in 2024 and 2025.
From Camp Cooke to Space Force base
The land was Camp Cooke, activated October 5, 1941. It became Vandenberg Air Force Base on October 4, 1958 and Vandenberg Space Force Base on May 14, 2021.
The first launch in this log, on February 28, 1959, was a Thor-Agena from Space Launch Complex 1 West, called the world's first polar-orbit satellite launch (a Space Review article argues it never reached orbit). GCAT itself records the launch as a failure.
The pads
SLC-4E, the pad SpaceX uses, has 219 launches in the pad table. SpaceX's first launch from it was September 29, 2013 (CASSIOPE). October 2018 brought the first ground landing of a Falcon 9 booster at Vandenberg.
SLC-6 has an odder history. It was chosen in 1972 for the Space Shuttle, a plan cancelled after the 1986 Challenger loss, then used for Delta IV (first launch June 27, 2006) and leased to SpaceX in April 2023. SLC-4E accounts for 94% of the launches in the pad table. The table shows 2 launches from SLC-6, plus 7 from SLC-2W and 2 from SLC-3E.
Why this page counts fewer launches than the base does
Landsat 9 flew on September 27, 2021 as the base's 2,000th launch. That figure counts missile tests and other flights as well as orbital launches, so it's well above the 896 orbital attempts here. This page counts only the orbital kind, one per launch, including failures.
In the recent rocket table Falcon 9 has 175, Firefly Alpha has 3 and Minotaur IV has 2. The monthly pattern for 2025 ranges from 3 to 8 launches.
Smaller rockets on the same coast
Firefly Alpha is the second rocket in the recent table, with 3 launches. Its first launch, on September 3, 2021 from SLC-2W, failed when an engine failed about 15 seconds after liftoff. A launch on October 1, 2022 reached orbit too low, and most of its satellites reentered about a week later. The first fully successful launch was on September 15, 2023, the VICTUS NOX mission. On December 22, 2023, a second stage relight didn't deliver the payload to its target orbit, and on April 29, 2025 a stage separation mishap damaged the second stage engine.
Minotaur IV has 2 launches in the same table. Together the two are a small slice next to Falcon 9's 175, and SpaceX flew 64 of the 66 launches in 2025, 97%.
SpaceX and the base
Across its whole history SpaceX has launched 235 times from Vandenberg, out of its 728 total. That's 32% of the company's flights.
SpaceX's first launch from the base, from SLC-4E, was September 29, 2013 (CASSIOPE). Falcon 9 has 175 launches in the recent rocket table, so the base's other users are few.
Passing Florida
2026 is the first year since 1988 in which Vandenberg has more launches than Florida: 67 against 59 through October 16, 2026. In 2019 the gap ran the other way, 16 to 3.
The comparison covers the same GCAT log for both sites, and 2026 is a partial year. Florida had 86 launches at this point in 2025 and Vandenberg had 51. The year-by-year totals for the whole world are on the 2026 launches page.
Month by month
The monthly table for 2025 runs from 3 launches in February to 8 in September. In 2025 the base's 66 launches were 20% of the world's 329 and 36% of the United States' 181.
Of the base's 896 attempts, 58 failed, 6.5%, against 5.6% for Florida.
A decade of growth
In 2019 there were 3 launches from the base. By 2025 there were 66, 22 times as many. Almost all of that growth is Falcon 9 flights for SpaceX.
For the other big American coast, see Florida. Who flies from which site is also on the SpaceX page.