Inversion Space accelerates orbital reentry vehicle tech with $71M Space Force contract
Goods are shipped around the world via roads, rail, and air. Why not space, too?
That’s the question posed by Inversion Space, a Los Angeles-based startup that’s developing a reentry capsule that it says will be capable of autonomously landing anywhere on Earth to a football field-sized degree of accuracy.
Equipped with a new $71 million contract from SpaceWERX, the technology development arm of the U.S. Space Force, Inversion is now racing toward a demonstration mission of its full-scale reentry vehicle as soon as 2026.
“There really has not been a product that does this, that is able to land highly precisely, deliver on the order of hundreds of pounds of cargo to a location that people can quickly access,” Justin Fiaschetti, co-founder and CEO of Inversion, said in a recent interview.
If it works as claimed, the reusable Arc (autonomous reentry capsule) vehicle could transform terrestrial cargo transportation, especially in remote areas or battlefields. It’s no surprise that this technology is of interest to the U.S. Department of Defense, whose millions of service members operate a mind-bogglingly large logistics network spanning the globe.
“Part of what's interesting about our products is their value is not generated in space,” Fiaschetti said. “Their value is generated back on the ground. So we care a lot about how they work when they get to the ground. How do you access them? How accurate are they? How rough is the landing?”
Inversion will be launching a subscale pathfinder capsule called Ray on the SpaceX Transporter-12 rideshare mission in October, though that vehicle will not actually demonstrate the precision delivery tech. That will be the goal of the first Arc demo, though other details about Arc, like its size, have not yet been disclosed by the company.
The three-year-old company is also keeping tight-lipped about other aspects of the architecture, like just how quickly a customer would be able to summon an Arc from orbit to ground, or the pricing. Unlike many forms of terrestrial transport, more vehicles in operation doesn’t necessarily mean a cheaper service.
“The cost of delivery from space is directly correlated with how many vehicles you have in space,” he said. “So there's strong incentive for us to minimize the number of vehicles in space. [...] This is a cost question in a lot of ways. If I can deliver to remote areas faster than before, how valuable is that for [customers]? The lower we make the dollar amount of cost, the more people that cost equation checks off for.”
The type of contract Inversion was awarded, called a Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI) agreement, is part of a broader effort to field these new technologies, often being built by small startups, into DOD operation. STRATFI awards were established by AFWERX, the Air Force innovation arm, just three years ago to help startups bridge the “valley of death,” a treacherous phenomenon for defense-focused startups that fail to transition products from R&D into operational use. The $71 million is a mix of money from SpaceWERX, government end users, and private matching, Inversion said; on AFWERX's website it states the awards are a mix of with a 1:1:2 ratio, so one could extrapolate that the total capital to Inversion is composed of $17.75 million from SpaceWERX, $17.75 million from government end users and $35.5 million of private capital from unnamed investors, though the startup didn't confirm these figures by publication time.
Inversion Space was one of nine space companies to have been awarded STRATFI agreements in this latest cohort. The full list of companies, which includes startups like K2 Space and Impulse Space, was announced in August, though the exact amount of each contract was not disclosed at the time.
