UP Aerospace

UP Aerospace Inc. is a privately held suborbital launch and flight test services company founded in 1998 by Jerry Larson, a former Lockheed Martin aerospace engineer, and formally incorporated in 2004. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, the company built its reputation on providing low-cost, rapid-turnaround access to space for research, technology demonstration, and educational payloads, positioning itself as an alternative to larger, more expensive orbital launch providers for customers who only need a brief window of microgravity or a hypersonic flight environment.

UP Aerospace conducts its launch operations from Spaceport America in New Mexico, where it became one of the facility's founding tenants. Its first launch attempt, a SpaceLoft XL sounding rocket flown on September 25, 2006, ended in failure, but the company achieved a widely publicized success in 2007 when it launched the cremated remains of Star Trek actor James Doohan and Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper on a successful suborbital flight — the first successful launch from Spaceport America. Since then, UP Aerospace has completed more than twenty missions, working with customers including NASA's Flight Opportunities Program, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and various university and commercial research groups, while using White Sands Missile Range for downrange payload recovery.

The company's flagship product is the SpaceLoft XL sounding rocket, a solid-fuel, single-stage suborbital vehicle capable of carrying payloads of roughly 36 kg (79 lb) to altitudes around 120–225 km, providing several minutes of microgravity time before a parachute-assisted, on-land payload recovery. The vehicle has flown for nearly two decades and remains one of the most flight-proven commercial sounding rockets operating from U.S. soil, serving as a workhorse platform for technology maturation, materials science, and student experiments.

Building on the SpaceLoft heritage, UP Aerospace has more recently developed the Spyder sub-orbital vehicle, a higher-performance single-stage rocket designed to reach speeds in excess of Mach 10 and altitudes up to 400 km, which completed its maiden flight in 2025 with support from NASA. The company has also disclosed work on a small orbital launch vehicle, signaling an ambition to extend its low-cost, high-cadence launch philosophy from the suborbital regime into dedicated small-satellite orbital delivery in the years ahead.