altitude for balloons is about 40 km, and the minimum for satellites is approximately 120 km.

Due to their suborbital flight profile, sounding rockets are often much simpler than their counterparts built for orbital flight. Certain sounding rockets have an apogee between 1000 and 1500 km, such as the Black Brant X and XII. Sounding rockets may be flown to altitudes as high as 3000 km to allow observing times of around 40 minutes to provide geophysical