LAS Meeting – June 18, 2026

Planes, Rockets and Baloons:

80 years of suborbital space research at the University of Colorado

Tom Woods, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at University of Colorado at Boulder

Before NASA and the era of satellites, space research began in the 1930s-1940s as modest experiments to study Earth’s upper atmosphere (stratosphere) and solar ultraviolet radiation using planes, rockets, and balloons. None of these early science missions made it into an orbit about Earth and thus are known as suborbital flights.

The first University of Colorado suborbital missions were led by Physics Department professors with flights of their solar instruments aboard captured V2 rockets. A research group called the Upper Air Laboratory (UAL) was created in 1948 to develop new rocket technology and science instruments for this new field of space physics.

UAL was renamed in 1965 to Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) and expanded their research to also include satellites and continuation of suborbital space research. University of Colorado has had more than 240 suborbital rocket flights since 1948, and they still have very active suborbital rocket programs to develop new space hardware technology, study time-critical events like new comets, underflight calibrations for some of their satellite instruments, and train the next generation of space scientists and engineers.

This presentation will provide an introduction to some of this rocket and space instrument technology and science topics and will end with a remarkable movie from cameras aboard one of our suborbital rocket flights.