I'm not sure I follow when you say "the rocket selects an orbit as its destination"; that is to my knowledge, rockets don't select a destination outside of when the "Automatic requests from space platforms" checkbox is checked in the rocket-silo GUI.
Additionally, I've checked both versions 0.7.3 (2.0) and 1.0.0 (2.1), to which I cannot recreate the issue you are experiencing (rockets successfully launched with satellites and contributed to the "orbit" count)
If you are comfortable, do you mind sharing your mod-list/mod-list.json and/or a save in which you are experiencing this issue? I would like to get to the bottom of this, as I believe the rockets/satellites "should" be launching in the contexts you've mentioned.