UNOOSA Register of Objects Launched into Outer Space

It is the United Nations' official ledger of what has been placed in orbit, delivered by Datadory as structured rows. Since 1962 the Secretary-General has maintained a Register of Objects Launched into Outer Space, and since 1976 its legal basis has been the Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space: states parties and consenting international organizations must establish national registries and furnish information to the UN, with maintenance delegated to the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs. Submissions arrive as official documents in the ST/SG/SER.E series, issued in all six UN languages.

The scale claim is UNOOSA's own: approximately 85 percent of all satellites, probes, landers, crewed spacecraft and space-station flight elements ever launched into Earth orbit or beyond appear in the Register - tens of thousands of objects spread across thousands of state filings. What distinguishes it from a tracking catalog is the unit of observation. A tracking catalog logs where an object is; the Register records that a state formally accepted responsibility for putting it there. That is why the fields read like a filing rather than telemetry: designator, object name, launch date and site, four orbital characteristics, general function, decay date, registering state, document symbol. Read as PDFs this dies in document folders; resolved into one row per object, which states registered how many communications satellites into 53-degree inclinations last year becomes a filter. Get a sample of this dataset and inspect real registration records before committing pipeline time.

Three real object rows captured during the August 2026 pass, all from one United States submission - document ST/SG/SER.E/1287, covering a single Starlink launch:

international_designation : 2025-022A     name_of_space_object : Starlink-32868
date_of_launch           : 1 February 2025
location_of_launch       : AFWTR         registering_state    : United States of America
nodal_period_minutes     : 93.53         inclination_degrees  : 53.16
apogee_km                : 448           perigee_km           : 446
general_function         : C             date_of_decay        : (none)
document_symbol          : ST/SG/SER.E/1287

Read what one filing proves. A single launch produced a batch of sibling rows - 022A, 022B, 022G - sharing launch date, site and near-identical orbits but differing in perigee by single kilometres, because each object's registration is its own. The general_function code C marks communications; the empty decay column marks hardware still up. And document_symbol is the receipt: every row traces to a numbered, dated, state-signed filing, which is more provenance than any commercial catalog can offer. Example rows are illustrative of the record shape; field-level detail follows below.

Twelve fields define every object row, each one an answer a launching state filed rather than a value an instrument measured. Definitions were verified against live registration submissions during cataloging.

Identity: international_designation carries the COSPAR designator - launch year, launch number, piece letter - which is the key that matches treaty records against tracking catalogs and operator fleet lists without fuzzy matching. name_of_space_object preserves the state-filed name, constellation schemes included.

Orbit and purpose: four basic characteristics - nodal_period_minutes, inclination_degrees, apogee_km, perigee_km - sketch the orbit in four numbers, while general_function classifies the mission as a code whose legend publishes alongside the Register's index. date_of_decay closes out objects that came down, and its emptiness is itself the live-versus-retired flag.

Provenance: registering_state names the jurisdiction asserting responsibility - the legally meaningful party under the Convention - and document_symbol pins each row to its numbered filing. Entries flagged in the footnote fold under additional fields on request.

Beyond the twelve-column core, five extensions reshape the same universe; each gets mapped to your use case at sampling:

• Submission-level rollups - per-state filing counts and object tallies reconciled into one table, when the unit of work is the filing rather than the object.
• Decay-cut subsets - re-entered objects isolated to any date range, for fleet-mortality and re-entry studies.
• State-by-state panels - one row per registering state per period, for sovereignty-share and market-share analysis.
• Tracking-catalog crosswalks - COSPAR-to-catalog identifier joins so treaty records meet orbital element sets on a shared key.
• Function-code expansion - the single-letter general_function legend resolved into readable labels on every row.

Name the ones your models need when you request a sample and the extract comes back cut to exactly that shape.

Geography: global by treaty. Every launching state registers, along with consenting intergovernmental organizations, so coverage tracks who launches rather than who publishes well. Completeness varies by state - some file promptly and thoroughly, others sparsely - which is why state-level counts double as a measure of registry diligence, not just launch activity.

Temporal: the Register reaches back to 1962, older than its own legal basis, because early entries predate the 1976 Convention. Submissions continue to the present on a rolling basis. Plan around a reporting lag: weeks to months can pass between a launch and its appearance, because the launching state must file before the UN publishes anything. Treat it as a confirmation signal, not a breaking-news wire.

Granularity: one row per space object, nested within per-state periodic registration submissions. A single launch yields many sibling rows; a single filing may cover years of a program. Fix the grain before scoping a request - counting filings and counting objects produce different numbers, both correct.

Scale check against Datadory's wider catalog - 1,744 datasets across 159 viable industries, average quality score 7.81 - this slice scores 6/10, docked for document-born raw material and reporting lag, with field definitions verified cleanly during research.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

The channel and cadence are yours; the twelve-field dictionary travels unchanged through all three. Because the hard part here was never availability - it was turning six-language official documents into typed rows - the delivery arrives already parsed: designator-keyed, state-attributed, decay-flagged, ready to join. Weekly suits monitoring a specific operator's filings; monthly suits trend and policy work; a full-history load suits anyone building the decades-long panel the Register uniquely supports.

• Operator and fleet due diligence - confirm what a company or country has formally registered and under which jurisdiction before pricing insurance, spectrum or acquisition exposure; registering_state converts ownership claims into treaty filings.
• Space-policy and sovereignty research - liability follows the registering state, so state-level panels quantify burden-sharing arguments that otherwise stay rhetorical; see the journalists academics use cases profile.
• Constellation deployment tracking - batch filings joined on date_of_launch show how fast each program converts licenses into registered hardware, filing by filing.
• Orbital-population and debris studies - populated versus empty date_of_decay splits survivors from re-entered objects for mortality curves by function and orbit band.
• Market sizing - general_function plus launch dates give consultants a treaty-grade payload mix, citable where commercial catalogs need provenance footnotes.
• Compliance screening - an asset missing from the register is a queryable gap, not a hunch, which is the difference insurers and lenders care about.

Ranked by relevance in Datadory's persona tagging:

1. Journalists, academics & students - document-symbol-stamped rows reaching back to 1962, citable without a provenance footnote; the journalists academics use cases page maps the workflow.
2. Market researchers & consultants - function-coded, state-attributed payload history for space-economy sizing that survives methodology review; see market researchers working in aerospace & defense.
3. Data scientists & ML engineers - a designator-keyed corpus with labels for function, orbit and fate, ready for classification and lifetime models; the data scientists use cases briefing goes deeper.
4. Competitive intelligence & product teams - competitor constellations confirmed at filing time, lag accepted for treaty-grade certainty; see the competitive intel product teams use cases page.
5. Sales & growth teams - registered operators identified by state and function for ground-segment and insurance prospecting off public record; see sales growth teams working in aerospace & defense.

Within the space cluster of our aerospace defense data hub, the nearest neighbor is Space-Track: roughly 51,500 tracked objects and more than 138 million historical element sets, precise about where everything is and silent on who answers for it. The Register is the mirror image - thin on propagation, definitive on jurisdiction, function and fate. NASA Open Data Portal indexes 36,250 agency datasets but holds no per-object registry of the world's launches. The pairing that pays: propagate with element sets, then attribute with the Register - where from one feed, whose and what for from the other, joined on the COSPAR designator both sides understand. Choose the Register when the question is who officially registered what, when, and under which flag.

Notes worth reading beside this page:

• Aerospace & Defense data hub - the pooled industry view this record sits inside, from airworthiness directives to arms-transfer flows.
• Space-Track Space Catalog API - the orbital-mechanics counterpart: element sets where the Register supplies jurisdiction and function.
• Best aerospace & defense datasets - where this dataset ranks among the strongest sources for the sector.
• Real-time satellite tracking glossary entry - what live position feeds do, and why they still cannot tell you whose object it legally is.