Babe, Wake Up. A New Spaceplane Just Dropped

Hello everyone, welcome to Tomorrow. There is a new company that has recently announced a new space plane. And although technically they are saying it's not a space plane, it's technically a lifting body, I don't care, it's a space plane. I'm talking about Inversion Space, which was founded in 2021 by two guys who happened to be roommates, one of whom previously worked for SpaceX and for Relativity, the other for ABL Systems. This is a small company in Los Angeles that actually has quite a bit of aerospace talent, despite only having a handful of employees. I think right now they have around 60 employees, but they are hiring and they're looking for GNC and avionics people, if you know anyone who needs a job. And yeah, this is their Ark spacecraft. Yes, a lifting body, but still looks like a space plane. In fact, it kind of reminds me of a little mini dream chaser. So this is a great time for this to be announced. Well, this is a relatively small spacecraft. It's only four feet wide and eight feet long. The purpose of this would be cargo delivery and not to the International Space Station, but to places on the ground. The idea being that they could get cargo to anywhere on earth within one hour. Of course, that would mean having dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of these things already placed in orbit with the cargo that they intend to deliver. And this actually fits in nicely with a program that the Space Force has launched. So far, they've invested $200 million so far into companies like this, pursuing ideas and ways that they could get cargo delivered in under an hour. And it turns out that the Space Force has quite a long list of different types of items and equipment that they would want. It's not just your usual survival type equipment and maybe additional ammunition, but also drones, radar equipment, radio equipment, and just for good measure, several classified pieces of equipment that we'll probably never know about. Out of that program, the Space Force gave this company Inversion Space a $71 million contract to demonstrate their technology. In fact, I want to show you some clips from their unveiling event where their CEO and co-founder Justin Fiacchetti explains quite a bit more about its capabilities. And so ARC's payload bay is designed to carry any payload in orbit for up to five years comfortably without any modifications to it. So what you put in the warehouse on the ground, you can put in space and get it down in under an hour. And finally, if we really want to land anywhere and go have true global access, we have to be able to land on any terrain. And so we've developed a system on ARC that allows us to land anywhere, anytime, whether that is on rough terrain, in the ocean, or on flat land with our autonomous landing system. I think that this is a really interesting concept, and especially with these maneuverable flaps at the end, they can actually do some real maneuverability with this at high speed and at high g-forces during reentry. And it's interesting to me that after reentry, they plan on deploying a basically a paragliding sail, not a sail, but a paragliding parachute and spiral down to where their destination is supposed to be. Surprisingly, they've already done quite a few tests. In fact, they have two subscale demonstrators that they did parachute tests at the same time with. I actually think that that's really smart to have two different vehicles testing at the same exact time. Maximize your time. They have a couple of acres out in the Mojave Desert where they can do those kinds of things. As a matter of fact, they've already flown a spacecraft before, but this wasn't a lifting body subscale demonstrator. This was more of a subscale capsule attached to a small service module. In fact, it launched earlier this year in January of twenty twenty five on the transporter twelve mission. This was their race spacecraft. And even in the testing of its parachutes, these guys are so crazy because not only were they able to test out the parachute on their tiny little reentry capsule, but then, hey, why don't we take advantage of this and do a test on our paragliding parachute as well with a person? These guys are crazy and I love that. It honestly seems like pretty traditional paragliding parachutes and just figuring out ways to control it robotically, which, by the way, whatever this mock up is, I'm pretty sure that's just a mock up during their presentation here. Could we maybe slap one of these paragliding engines on the back of it and maybe you can give free rides to potential investors or something? I don't know. By the way, on their raid mission, they were able to test out several technologies, their communications, their avionics, their batteries, even testing their thrusters that they've been able to develop in house. Unfortunately, with a more powerful engine they had developed, it wasn't able to ignite as intended. So their reentry experiment with this little capsule wasn't actually able to happen. It's still in space right now. And Inversion Space claims that they are fully in control of the vehicle and could attempt a reentry at some point in the future. However, their window that they had received a license to reenter that had lapsed when they failed to do the reentry burn. At the very least, they already have a little bit of space flight experience for at least some of the components that would eventually be used on their Ark spacecraft, the Ark space plane. I'm sorry. I'm going to call it a space plane. I don't care for the heat shield material on this space plane. Inversion Space has been working with NASA Ames to help them develop their own proprietary heat shield technology, which they're aiming to manufacture in-house. They're trying to do as much in-house as they possibly can to keep costs down and also to work quickly. As a matter of fact, here's what they had to say about when we might see these. We've been making a ton of progress. The facility is looking great. The vehicle is looking great. And you won't have to wait very long to see Ark fly because first flight is next year. So flying for the first time in 2026 and we will have our first operational delivery from space constellation on orbit in 2028. So, yeah, this is great progress. And although their primary customer seems to be this military project, there have been a couple of other avenues already that people are asking them about. When we were talking to folks, we kept hearing, hey, Ark can maneuver. We would love to use that for hypersonic testing. And so that is exactly what we're doing. Ark is one of the most advanced hypersonic test platforms that exist. Allowing for high maneuverability throughout reentry above Mach 20, allowing for time on condition far exceeding anything else that exists, as well as flying high G maneuvers. So we're incredibly, incredibly proud to say that we've joined Kratos on the Mach TB 2.0 contract. This is a program of record that is about 1.4 billion dollars and is the country's leading hypersonic testing program. So we're excited for that and excited for that partnership and couldn't be more grateful for it. Either to test out different technology for hypersonic type vehicles or to help train tracking satellites, the type that we eventually want for the Golden Dome to be able to warn us whenever there's hypersonic missiles or ballistic missiles or anything like that. So it's kind of got a dual use of both testing out hypersonic technology and helping to train our preventative interceptor tracking satellites. And maybe if they get paid enough, they might even use them as targets to mitigate hypersonic tests. We got to make sure that we can shoot down hypersonic stuff if that ever does become a threat. And just that alone might be able to keep them afloat until they achieve their bigger goal. It seems like they would love for this to be like the Amazon of space delivering stuff to Earth. And you know what? Maybe there is a market for that kind of sorta like when it comes to these tissues that we're growing at the International Space Station, space levers and space hearts and space kidneys. That might be a good business case to be able to deliver those quickly on demand, either as soon as they're ready or in a state of storage in multiple orbits so that it can reach anywhere in the world in under an hour. There is one other business case for this. You may have noticed that it has a small service module for when it's coasting during its waiting phase before it would reenter. And maybe they could have a slightly larger service module for the purpose of doing missions like the X-37B, where maybe it rendezvous with other satellites. Maybe it spies on other satellites. Maybe it does satellite resurfacing or deployments into specific orbits. There's all sorts of use cases for that as it being a vehicle that meets up with other vehicles already in space for various reasons. Again, probably a lot of military applications, but there might be a use case for that in satellite servicing. I thought their presentation was really well done. And if you would like to watch the whole thing, it's about 19 minutes. I'll put a link to that down below. And it seems like they're doing everything right and have a really good path for themselves. As long as things don't get messed up for them, they might actually be flying these things and get a ton of that military money. It's a space plane. Come on, guys. What's not to love about a space plane? If you're anything like me, you're already imagining the next bigger and better version that could maybe carry people and be your own personal space shuttle. It doesn't seem like they have any ambitions for that right now. But maybe if business is good, they do have larger plans. They just don't want to talk about them yet until they actually have several contracts under their belt. One can hope anyway. So what do you think about this? Do you think that this company has a chance of actually flying dozens or thousands of these things someday? Probably willing to bet that they'll at least get their one demonstration mission. We'll see how it goes from there. But do you think that they have a good business case here and that they might build a bigger, better version someday? Or is this just kind of one of those DARPA projects that are cool and neat, but never end up becoming anything? What do you think? Well, with that, I think I'll wrap things up here. Join me tomorrow where I'll be talking about some minor updates with all of the commercial space station companies. Vast, in particular, is almost ready to launch their small component demo mission, the Haven demo mission. It's not the space station module, but a lot of the components that will be critical to successfully operating a space station. Anyway, join me for that next video. Thank you very much for watching this video. Be sure to do all the YouTube engagement stuff. And until the next time I see you guys, keep moving onwards and upwards. And don't forget, Per Aspera Ad Astra, through difficulty to the stars. You know, we think that not only should the world have a super advanced transportation method, but that transportation method should also be beautiful. And we think that Ark is definitely one of the most beautiful spacecraft we've ever seen. And so good work on that. It's some pretty cool stuff. It's pretty dope.