Generation Orbit

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.