This paper presents a new controller for swinging up the spherical pendulum. The problem of stabilizing the upright equilibrium of the spherical pendulum is typically solved in two steps: First, a controller is used to swing up the pendulum so that it enters some vicinity of the upright equilibrium, and then a locally stabilizing controller is used. The contribution of this paper is the design of a controller that solves the first subproblem for almost all initial conditions. The controller stabilizes the two-dimensional stable manifold of the hyperbolic upright equilibrium. The proposed technique is based on the passivity properties of the spherical pendulum. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.