{"id":44118,"date":"2025-10-03T00:41:55","date_gmt":"2025-10-02T16:41:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/meet-the-arc-spacecraft-it-aims-to-deliver-cargo-anywhere-in-the-world-in-an-hour\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T00:41:55","modified_gmt":"2025-10-02T16:41:55","slug":"meet-the-arc-spacecraft-it-aims-to-deliver-cargo-anywhere-in-the-world-in-an-hour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/meet-the-arc-spacecraft-it-aims-to-deliver-cargo-anywhere-in-the-world-in-an-hour\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Arc spacecraft: It aims to deliver cargo anywhere in the world in an hour"},"content":{"rendered":"

A relatively new spacecraft company, Inversion, revealed its new \u201con demand\u201d delivery vehicle Wednesday evening during a splashy ceremony at its factory in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe 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\u2019re needed, being able to bring their cargo or effects to the desired location in under an hour,\u201d said Justin Fiaschetti, co-founder and chief executive of Inversion, in an interview with Ars before the event.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Space is a highway<\/h2>\n

\u201cSpace is fun to talk about as a destination, and people really were talking about it that way then,\u201d Fiaschetti said. \u201cBut 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Three years later, the company, with just 25 employees, cobbled together a small spacecraft named \u201cRay\u201d as a demonstration of its technology. It launched as part of SpaceX\u2019s Transporter-12 mission in January of this year. Ray was intended to fly in space using Inversion\u2019s in-house subsystems before firing its bipropellant rocket engine to perform a deorbit burn and land off the coast of California.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Arc spacecraft lands under parachutes in this rendering.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n Inversion<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

The test spacecraft, with a mass of about 200 pounds (90 kg), performed well, Fiaschetti said. It demonstrated the capability to raise and lower its orbit and remains power-positive to date, periodically checking in with Inversion flight controllers. However, the spacecraft will not make a controlled landing.<\/p>\n

\u201cRay won\u2019t be coming back,\u201d Fiaschetti said. \u201cWe\u2019re doing long-term testing of software on orbit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although Ray did not land, Inversion now feels confident enough in its technology to move into the production of the larger Arc vehicle, which was unveiled on Wednesday evening. About the size of a large tabletop\u2014Arc is 4 feet wide and 8 feet tall\u2014the company is aiming to launch the first Arc vehicle by the end of 2026. Fiaschetti said Inversion is \u201con a really good path\u201d to make that timeline.<\/p>\n

So what does the military want to ship?<\/h2>\n

Arc is a lifting body spacecraft, and it will do the majority of its maneuvering in the atmosphere, where it has 1,000 km of cross-range capability during reentry. It will land under parachutes and therefore not require a runway. Because the vehicle\u2019s propulsion system uses non-toxic materials, a soldier can approach it immediately after landing without any protective gear.<\/p>\n

So what would the US military want to pre-position in space for delivery at a moment\u2019s notice to any location around the world?<\/p>\n

\u201cWe like to describe this as mission-enabling cargo or effects,\u201d Fiaschetti said. \u201cThis could be a wide variety of specific payloads, anything from medical supplies to drones to what have you. But the key discriminator is, does this make a difference in the moment it\u2019s needed when it gets back down to the ground? You know, for the military and national security, if they need their cargo before the fight is over.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company says it has already built a \u201cfull-scale manufacturing development unit of the primary structure\u201d for the first Arc vehicle. It would be an impressive capability if the small team at Inversion\u2014now 60 people strong, and growing\u2014can bring the Arc spacecraft to market. If<\/em>, of course, is the operative word. \u201cSpace is hard\u201d may be a clich\u00e9, but it also happens to be true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A relatively new spacecraft company, Inversion, revealed its new \u201con demand\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44119,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9528,9529,439,9530,21,332],"class_list":["post-44118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-arc","tag-inversion","tag-military","tag-rocket-cargo","tag-space","tag-space-force"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44118"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44118\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}