Startup Inversion has unveiled a compact spacecraft that can deliver up to 500 pounds of cargo without a runway. The invention was prompted in part by the need to quickly deliver everything the US military needs, UNN writes with reference to Ars Technica.
Details
On Wednesday evening, during a lavish ceremony at its Los Angeles factory, a relatively new spacecraft company Inversion announced its new vehicle, the Arc.
The company said it is building the spacecraft "to give the US military the ability to deliver up to 500 pounds of supplies to virtually anywhere in the world, almost instantly."
The nominal mission for us is to pre-position Arcs in orbit and keep them there for up to five years, be able to call them up and autonomously land them wherever and whenever they need to be, and be able to deliver cargo or supplies to the right place in less than an hour
The founders
Inversion was founded in early 2021 by Fiaschetti and Austin Briggs. Both were students at Boston University. Fiaschetti interned at SpaceX and Relativity Space, where he worked on propulsion systems. He left Boston University to co-found Inversion.
It’s interesting to talk about space as a direction, and people really did talk about it that way back then. But the real economic value of space is in accessing the globe, and we realized we could do that with physical payloads, not just data. So we founded Inversion to build space-dwelling vehicles to do that
The first experiment
Three years later, the company, with just 25 employees, assembled a small spacecraft called Ray as a demonstration of its technology. It launched on the SpaceX Transporter-12 mission in January of this year. Ray was intended to fly into space using Inversion’s own subsystems, then fire its dual-fuel rocket engine to deorbit and land off the coast of California.
The test spacecraft, weighing about 200 pounds, demonstrated its ability to reach orbit and remains active today.
Ray will not return. We are conducting long-term software testing in orbit
While Ray didn’t land, Inversion is now confident enough in its technology to move on to building a larger Arc vehicle.
What the ship will deliver
The Arc will land by parachute and therefore won’t need a runway. Since the ship’s powerplant uses non-toxic materials, a soldier can approach it immediately after landing without any protective gear.
It could be a wide range of specific payloads, anything from medical supplies to drones, etc. But the key factor is whether it makes a difference when it’s needed. You know, for the military and national security, if they need their cargo before the end of the battle
The company says it has already built a "full-scale basic design development production facility" for the first Arc ship.