T+337: Inversion Space (with Justin Fiaschetti, Co-Founder and CEO)

So what were the things, you know, you...

A- as you worked through those early days and then the early days of the company, what were the things that, that you found were the biggest issue to solve to unlock the opportunity? Like, no one else was doing it.

Was that they hadn't found the buyer, or there was something about reentry and guidance that was really sticky? What were the things that you were most worried about going in?

Yeah, I mean, the biggest challenge around deployment from space, which is kind of what this category is being called, is how do you have a single vehicle on orbit access a large swath of area on the ground? And then how do you have it land precisely? Those two problems kind of lead down what product direction needs to happen for deployment from space to become a reality.

Um, on the first one, right, having a large coverage area, that's important so that you don't need thousands and thousands and thousands of vehicles up on orbit just to have, like, a, the single layer of coverage of the globe.

Um, you know, you look at Starlink, and it has thousands and thousands.

That doesn't super work for deployment from space.

You wanna bring the cost down of the whole network because, uh, each individual delivery system is, uh, some amount of value once it is used.

And so how do you increase range? Well, what we did is we went back to the '60s when they were looking at this exact problem for the CORONA program.

So, so the Corona program, if people aren't familiar, was where the US government was using, uh, film cameras in orbit to be able to image, uh, around the globe.

And they would drop these reentry capsules, just a, a sphere cone capsule that's a ballistic reentry vehicle, back into the atmosphere, and they would get caught by, uh, an, a, um, aircraft while they're under parachute.

But one of the challenges that the government was having was that they would have to wait to return that film until the orbit of that s- uh, of that imaging satellite precessed until it was over their designated landing location.

Which meant it was very difficult for them to get real time images, or as real time as they could have, because of these ballistic capsules.

They would just fall back to wherever they were, so you have to wait until you have the perfect alignment.

And so that kicked off a development campaign to build maneuverable reentry vehicles, specifically lifting body reentry vehicles.

It started with a program called ASSET that allowed them...

That kind of demonstrated this idea of maneuverable reentry, allowing for large cross range.

That then progressed to, uh, a program that goes by a number of different names.

It goes by the name of Prime.

It goes by the name of X-23A.

It goes by the name of SV5D.

But it's basically the genesis of, uh, the kind of like more mature version of a lifting body reentry vehicle.

And the explicit reason for moving towards lifting bodies was that once they enter the atmosphere, they can bank and have a lot of cross range so they could get back to their landing site in a timely manner without having to let the orbits precess.

And we saw that, and we were like, "Okay, that is the same color of problem that we're trying to solve," which is store on orbit, access the globe rapidly.

And that led us down this path of lifting body reentry vehicles, but taking the last 60 or 70 years of technical advantages, uh, um, you know, pro- probably have like a million times the processing power as what those systems had, right? And so, you know, if you think back then, they did- they were not even able to fly unstable aircraft because the control systems were not good enough, right? And so we have a lot of advantages-