Hypersonics Companies

Ursa Major

Berthoud, Colorado, United States commercial

Ursa Major is a privately held liquid rocket engine manufacturer based in Berthoud, Colorado, founded in 2015 by Joe Laurienti, a former SpaceX and Blue Origin propulsion engineer. The company specializes in turbopump-fed liquid oxygen/kerosene engines designed for commercial launch vehicles and hypersonic vehicle applications, positioning itself as a dedicated U.S.-based propulsion supplier that lets launch integrators avoid vertical integration. Its flagship products are the Hadley engine (a 5,000 lbf-class staged-combustion engine used by operators including Stratolaunch) and Ripley (a 50,000 lbf-class engine intended for medium-lift rockets). The company has also publicly disclosed Draper, a solid-liquid hybrid engine concept aimed at the hypersonic systems market. In 2024 Ursa Major announced "Lynx," a modular solid rocket motor production capability intended to shore up U.S. solid-motor supply for defense customers. Funding rounds through 2023–2024 from investors including Explorer1 Fund, BlackRock, Eclipse Ventures, and Space Capital have pushed valuations into the hundreds of millions. Government customers include the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, and DARPA under hypersonic propulsion contracts. Ursa Major's strategy is to serve both the commercial smallsat-launch market and the U.S. defense propulsion base as a merchant-engine supplier.

Generation Orbit Launch Services (GO) is an American aerospace company founded on 25 April 2011 in Atlanta, Georgia, as a spin-off of SpaceWorks Enterprises, originally to develop air-launched small-satellite orbital launch vehicles under the GOLauncher family. The company's GOLauncher1 air-launch concept, intended to be carried aloft by a business-jet carrier aircraft, won the 2013 NewSpace Business Plan Competition and a NASA 'NEXT' award, and was later adapted into the X-60A, a reusable, air-launched hypersonic flight-test vehicle developed with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory; GO conducted a captive-carry test of its GO-FET testbed using a Learjet 35 in 2014 and continued ground and flight testing of the X-60A through the late 2010s and early 2020s. Rather than bringing an orbital small-launch vehicle to commercial service, Generation Orbit has increasingly repositioned itself as a hypersonic flight-test systems provider for defense customers, marketing the X-60A testbed and a newer reusable 'GO-Next' platform alongside propulsion test services. Public news coverage and announced flight activity dropped off sharply after 2021, and the company has not disclosed an orbital launch vehicle flight to date. Generation Orbit's own website remained live, describing current hypersonic-testing products with a 2025 copyright notice, as of research in September 2026, indicating the company continues to operate in some capacity, though its current scale of activity could not be independently confirmed from public sources.