Inversion Space is aptly named. The three-year-old startup's main focus is not on transporting things into space, but on bringing them back, turning the ultimate highlands into “Earth's transport layer.”
The company's plans for ultra-fast, on-demand delivery to any corner of the planet may sound like a cakewalk, but it's the kind of moonshot goal that could transform ground freight transportation. The goal is to send a fleet of Earth-orbiting vehicles capable of returning to Earth at Mach speeds and delivering cargo in minutes at lower speeds with specially designed parachutes.
Inversion has developed a Pathfinder vehicle called Ray, a technological precursor to the larger platform that will debut in 2026. Ray is scheduled to head into space this October on SpaceX's Transporter 12 rideshare mission, paving the way for future plans for inversion in orbit (and back).
The ray is small, about twice the diameter of a standard Frisbee, and will spend anywhere from one to five weeks in space, depending on factors such as weather and how its orbit aligns with the landing site. CEO Justin Fiaschetti explained in a recent interview.
This first mission has three phases. During the first on-orbit phase, the spacecraft powers up, charges its batteries, and hopefully transmits telemetry to the ground. In the second phase, Ray will use its onboard propulsion system to slow the craft, lower its altitude, and begin re-entering the atmosphere. The reentry capsule will separate from the satellite bus (both of its own design) and the latter structure will be burnt out.
During the third and final phase, Ray uses a supersonic drogue parachute to slow its reentry speed from Mach 1.8 to Mach 0.2. The main parachute then deploys, further slowing the capsule to a gentle splashdown off the coast of California.
Impressively, the company designed and manufactured nearly everything in the Ray vehicle in-house, from the propulsion system to the structure to the parachute. This last component is important. Few space companies design their own parachutes, and designing one from scratch is incredibly difficult. Inversion's engineering team completed qualification testing of the deployment and parachute systems last year.
The certification campaign for the complete recovery system for the Pathfinder vehicle Ray has been successfully completed. Both parachutes and their deployment systems were developed in-house by our recovery engineers Connor and Daniel. pic.twitter.com/mPquy1nGbE
— Inversion (@InversionSpace) September 5, 2023
Fiaschetti said strong vertical integration has helped the company move quickly.
“The purpose of our Ray vehicle is to develop technology for the next generation of vehicles. So we basically built the entire vehicle in-house,” Fiaschetti said. “What we've seen is that if we can build it in-house today, by doing the hard things first, we can scale very quickly and meet the needs of our customers.”
Although this re-entry spacecraft is completely passive, meaning it has no active controls to navigate its re-entry to Earth, the company's large next-generation spacecraft, called Ark, will It is planned to have “field-level” accuracy.
Inversion was founded in 2021 by CEO Justin Fiaschetti and CTO Austin Briggs, but their relationship goes back even further. We first met when we sat next to each other at Boston University's freshman entrance ceremony. The two eventually landed jobs in Southern California, with Briggs as a propulsion development engineer at ABL Space Systems and Fiaschetti briefly in engineering at Relativity and SpaceX. And they were actually roommates when they first came up with the idea of developing technology that could deliver cargo anywhere. on earth.
The company passed through Y Combinator in the summer of 2021 (one of our favorites among the cohort) and closed a $10 million seed round in November of the same year.
“We’ve been racing ever since,” Fiaschetti said. The company has grown to 25 employees and is based in Torrance, California, in a 5,000 square foot facility. The company owns 5 acres of land in the Mojave Desert where they test their engines. That round fully funded the team's expansion and this first mission.
The startup sees a promising market in both government agencies and private companies. In both segments, Inversion's reusable platform can be used as an in-orbit testbed or as a means of transportation to a private commercial space station. Inversion aims to “maximize” both reusability and in-orbit duration to reduce costs and support a variety of mission profiles, Fiaschetti said.
Inversion aims to fly its next-generation spacecraft, Ark, for the first time in 2026. The two co-founders did not provide any details about the spacecraft, but the company's website says it can carry more than 150 kilograms of cargo and is capable of “propagating” deliveries in space.
“We consistently test our hardware. We are developing an infrastructure that allows us to scale ourselves. The decision to bring Parachute in-house was made because Parachute is what we are building. Just as it was a decision that could be applied directly to Develop.