Even a fairly straightforward pizza delivery still requires at least 30 minutes to bake the pie, throw it in a car and drive it to your door. But Inversion, an aerospace and defense technology company, is raising the stakes by promising to deliver cargo from space to just about anywhere on Earth within one hour.
The star of Inversion’s DoorDash from Above is the Arc, a space-based vehicle capable of withstanding hypersonic reentry and landing softly to ensure safe delivery and reuse. Arc features a payload bay that can store just about any cargo or effects a specific mission calls for and a satellite platform that keeps Arc vehicles in constellation while in low-Earth orbit above each customers’ point of operations. When the Arc is called down, it autonomously flies through the atmosphere before parachuting to the pick-up spot.
Arc piggybacks off Inversion’s earlier spacecraft, Ray, which was developed almost entirely from scratch for $1 million by a small team. The new spacecraft should be ready to fly its first missions in 2026, and while early applications will likely focus on national security and defense, the company sees a much more expansion market for Arc.
Inversion Founders Justin Fiaschetti and Austin Briggs envision low-earth orbit as a global logistics network and Arc as the platform that allows almost any commercial, enterprise or government partner to take advantage of extremely rapid delivery to almost anywhere, regardless of available infrastructure.
The company has lofty aspirations for Arc. It compared the potential logistics breakthrough to world-changing transportation technologies like rail and aviation, and it said Arc has the potential to unlock new industries and reshape economies at “scales that few could have imagined at the start.”
If Arc can successfully and consistently deliver cargo from space in about the same amount of time it takes to bring a pizza to your door, it definitely has a chance to shake things up.
