The company is developing two-stage small satellite orbital launchers based on solid propellant rocket engines procured from major Chinese government supplier China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CAST).

[citation needed] By 2019, i-Space had successfully launched the Hyperbola-1S and Hyperbola-1Z single-stage solid-propellant test rockets into space on suborbital test flights,[2][12] and then reached low Earth orbit with Hyperbola-1 on its maiden flight on 25 July 2019, becoming the first private company from China to have achieved orbit.

The Hyperbola-1Z rocket has a diameter of about 1.4 m (4 ft 7 in), maximum design speed of 1.6 km/s (0.99 mi/s) and can reach altitude of 175 km (109 mi) on a suborbital trajectory.

[7] A subsequent investigation revealed that a piece of insulation had broken off and got stuck in the turning mechanism of grid fin Number IV.

When the piece was blown away, the control system then suddenly overcompensated, resulting in the rocket being ripped apart by excessive aerodynamic forces.

[13] After most of the day had passed, the Chinese official media Xinhua reported that the launch was unsuccessful due to off-nominal performance of the rocket which resulted in a failure to achieve orbit.

[8] An official statement released by the company itself the following day clarified that the failure was caused by a malfunctioning in the fairing separation process, that precluded the payload from reaching the target orbit.

[31]) i-Space is targeting a first flight of the expendable Hyperbola-3 for 2025, while an attempt at first-stage vertical landing and recovery is slated for 2026; a heavy-lift 3-core variant named the Hyperbola-3B is also planned by the company.

[9] In May 2018, i-Space indicated they hoped to eventually develop a reusable sub-orbital spaceplane (Chinese: 亚轨道概念飞行器) for space tourism.

[15][32] i-Space is in competition with several other Chinese space rocket startups, being LandSpace, Galactic Energy, ExPace, LinkSpace, OneSpace and Deep Blue Aerospace.