Kalam Labs' patented hydrogen lighter-than-air deployment carries aircraft and instruments 10x higher than conventional UAVs, to the edge of space.
Reusable upper-air weather platform
Over 80% of the 600,000 radiosondes launched each year are lost.
Long-endurance Earth observation from 50,000+ ft
Tested in rugged high-altitude mountain terrain
A persistent platform hovering at 50,000+ ft
Kalam Labs is a team of crazy young engineers obsessed with pushing the boundaries of flight at the edge of space.
We have in-house end-to-end airplane manufacturing, a leased airstrip, and a cool hangar filled with insane aerial inventions and toys.
Join Us to Open the Upper Atmosphere to Science :)
A 480 g recoverable weather aircraft. It rides a balloon to 30 km, profiles the atmosphere on the way up, then flies up to 50 km back to its landing site.
See the mission profile
In development
A station-keeping platform designed to hover above the weather for months at a time, carrying instruments for long-duration observation.
From weather to air quality, our platforms carry instruments into the upper atmosphere and bring the data home.
Live temperature, humidity and pressure profiles, streamed during ascent.
Standard-atmosphere reference: 15 °C at the surface, −56.5 °C from 11 to 20 km, and −46.5 °C at 30 km, where pressure is about 12 hPa.
Reference values: U.S. Standard Atmosphere, 1976
Repeat soundings with the same instrument. It flies itself home after every flight, so each profile comes from a sensor you have already checked.
Onboard gas sensing adds air-quality (AQI) readings to every profile.
Lower-cost, recoverable soundings for monitoring fast-changing conditions.
Optional 4K camera for balloon-burst observation, terrain reconstruction and post-flight review.
High-fidelity flight logs from every mission, ready for analysis and model training.
Sample log format: time, altitude, temperature, pressure
Results from supervised 2025 flight trials of the retrievable radiosonde.
Each dot is an active U.S. upper-air station. Across the National Weather Service network, radiosondes go up twice a day and are not expected to come back. A retrievable radiosonde records the same kind of profile and flies home.
Station locations: NOAA Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA v2), U.S. stations reporting in 2026. Puerto Rico and Pacific island stations are not shown. Launch schedule: National Weather Service.
Kalam Labs is a Stratospheric Aerial Research Lab. We are inventing technology that makes the upper atmosphere easier, cheaper and more repeatable to study.
Kalam Labs already has its own manufacturing facility and a 15-member aerospace team, ready to pull in sleepless nights to push flight higher.
Coverage of our flights, our team and our backers.
Contact
Questions about the retrievable radiosonde, our flight systems or a research collaboration? Call us.