A relatively new spacecraft company, Inversion, revealed its new "on demand" delivery vehicle Wednesday evening during a splashy ceremony at its factory in Los Angeles.
The company said it is building the Arc spacecraft to provide a capability to the US military to deliver as much as 500 pounds (225 kg) of supplies almost anywhere in the world, almost instantaneously.
"The nominal mission for us is pre-positioning Arcs on orbit, and having them stay up there for up to five years, able to be called upon and then autonomously go and land wherever and whenever they're needed, being able to bring their cargo or effects to the desired location in under an hour," said Justin Fiaschetti, co-founder and chief executive of Inversion, in an interview with Ars before the event.
Inversion was founded in early 2021 by Fiaschetti and Austin Briggs. Both were students at Boston University. Fiaschetti had internships at SpaceX and Relativity Space, where he worked on propulsion. He dropped out of Boston University to co-found Inversion because of a simple idea.
Space is a highway
"Space is fun to talk about as a destination, and people really were talking about it that way then," Fiaschetti said. "But the true economic value of space is accessing the globe, and we realized we could do that with physical cargo, rather than with just data. And so we founded Inversion to go and build reentry vehicles to go do that."
Three years later, the company, with just 25 employees, cobbled together a small spacecraft named "Ray" as a demonstration of its technology. It launched as part of SpaceX's Transporter-12 mission in January of this year. Ray was intended to fly in space using Inversion's in-house subsystems before firing its bipropellant rocket engine to perform a deorbit burn and land off the coast of California.