Thanks.

born1930: According to the treaty, a satellite belongs to the nation that launched it, under that nation’s laws. So a private American commercial satellite would belong to the company that paid for its construction and launch, and you couldn’t salvage it without their permission.

There are a number of interesting metrics that can be applied. Tonnage could be a measure of a country’s ability and willingness to place hardware into orbit or as probes to other planets and locations (e.g. solar orbit). After all, do smaller satellites such as Sputnik and Explorer 1 count as much as larger satellites, such as Hubble? They do when the metric is number of launches. Tonnage could act as an indicator of the amount of junk in Earth’s orbit and each country’s contribution to it.

The usefulness of the hardware could be another useful metric, such as the amount of data returned or amount of revenue, for commercial satellites.

Total expected mission longevity, summed over all the payloads launched that year.

I worked for a satellite manufacturing company that used the total historical satellite operational time, in hundreds of years, as an indicator of the value of the communication satellites they had built. A country’s total satellite and probe operational time could also measure that country’s operational experience.

How about the number of a country’s astronauts, cosmonauts, taikonauts, spationauts (France), etc. that went into space each year?

Maybe the number of launches per 100 million population indicates a country’s people’s commitment to space:
Country Launches population launches per
(100 million) 100 million
China 25 14 1.8
Europe 5 7.4 0.7
Japan 5 1.3 3.9
Russia 8 1.4 5.7
USA 24 3.3 7.3
(I hope these columns line up when posted)

However, the number of launches is a traditional metric standard, one that does not take into account other interesting factors. A couple of questions to ponder: when there are large numbers of small rockets putting large numbers of cubesats into orbit, will the number of launches seem or be any less interesting or important? When there are large numbers of manned launches each year, will that become a separate metric standard?

Science, exploration, innovation, and commerce will still be done with those smaller payloads, and their ease of launch (low manufacturing, launch, and operational costs) may result in far more productivity in space than if we had fewer launches of large payloads. More countries, companies, universities, and individuals will be able to afford to do their own operations in space.

Even if it is an average Joe working in a small shop just behind his garage to build a prototype solar array for a proof of concept test on orbit — because “the price was right.”
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/essays-and-commentaries/3d-printed-solar-panels-for-cubesats3d-solar-panels-for-cubesats/

That really would be great, its just too big of a chore and there would be numbers missing for some launches.

Man-made: Europe’s launches were all done by Arianespace, a corporation run under the auspices of the European Space Agency (ESA). I think my listing is very clear and accurate. If you want to be petty I could list this as the European Union, but that really isn’t right, since that organization really doesn’t run ESA.

I am counting launches, straight up. You want to break it down in other ways you are free to do so. Others for example have suggested that what counts more is the tonnage placed in orbit. I also told them I’d be interested in their analysis.