Interesting information about the chronology of "space" flight ... the attempts, failures and successful launches.
It's amazing, at least to me, how many attempts were made prior to 1957, though perhaps not as surprising to find out how many of the attempts were failures. Understandably, there was a the vast increase that occurred in the handful of succeeding years.
A brief summary of just the USA-based efforts from 1951-1957 (* based on the WikiPedia summary of data from various sources [see above]):
1951 -- 6 failures, 10 launches
1952 -- 4 failures, 26 launches
1953 -- 11 failures, 34 launches
1954 -- 5 failures, 11 launches
1955 -- 15 failures, 46 launches
1956 -- 13 failures, 68 launches
1957 -- 41 failures, 149 launches
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106 failures, 344 launches