Inversion Space

Arc is a capsule built to sit in orbit for up to five years with cargo inside it and then come down when told to, entering the atmosphere above Mach 20, steering itself, and landing under parachute anywhere on Earth within an hour of the command. It holds about 227 kilograms. The premise is that the slow part of global logistics is not flying the cargo but positioning it, so you position it in orbit and let gravity handle delivery.

Justin Fiaschetti and Austin Briggs left Boston University to start the company on the view that returning things from space is the unsolved half of spaceflight. The military framing came later and now dominates, because the same vehicle that delivers cargo is a reusable hypersonic testbed, which is what the Pentagon is currently buying. A $71 million SpaceWERX agreement is the largest single source of money in the business.

Inversion has never brought anything back from orbit. Ray, the subscale demonstrator, launched in January 2025 and validated most of what it was meant to: telemetry, attitude control, sensors, solar arrays, avionics, its own separation system and two manoeuvres on cold gas. Then the reentry never happened. An over-current shorted a transistor in the circuit that fires the spark plug, the deorbit engine never lit, and the capsule stayed up. The company called the mission largely successful, which is fair about the subsystems and not about the mission, and the failure is a reminder that reentry vehicles are lost to ordinary electronics as readily as to plasma. Arc is a far more capable machine that has to be built on a $44 million round management has said covers only its first flight.