Soyuz-U

Seven hundred and eighty-six launches over forty-four years, 765 of them successful. No other orbital vehicle is close. The quoted 10.3 metre diameter is the span across the four strap-on boosters at the base rather than any single tank; the core body is 2.95 metres. The height, 50.7 metres, is the weakest number in this record, carried by sources that do not say where it came from.

Everything lights on the ground. Four boosters at 838.5 kilonewtons each and a core at 792.5 kilonewtons all burn from the moment of release, and the boosters simply fall away when they are empty in the pattern known as the Korolev cross. The near-identical Soyuz-FG is quoted at 4,146.4 kilonewtons at sea level with the same engine set, which is where the figure here comes from.

That arrangement exists because of a 1950s trust problem. Soviet engineers did not believe they could reliably light an engine already in flight, so they lit everything on the pad and staged by dropping hardware away from engines that were already burning. A decision taken for a 1957 missile is why a rocket carrying a crew in 2019 still had the silhouette of an R-7.

A 97.3 percent success rate is not the product of careful design so much as of repetition at industrial scale. This vehicle was built the way a factory builds an appliance, and its failures were spread thinly enough across the record that customers stopped treating them as news.

It carried Progress freighters to Mir and then to the space station until February 2017, when it gave way to the digitally controlled Soyuz-2. Its crew-rated sibling the Soyuz-FG flew seventy times between 2001 and 2019 for one failure, and that failure, Soyuz MS-10 in October 2018, ended with both crew alive because an escape system drawn in the 1960s did exactly what it was drawn to do.