Inversion’s State-of-the-Art Ray Reentry Demonstrator Capsule to Launch This Fall on the Transporter-12 Mission with SpaceX
April 17 2024 - 11:00AM
Business Wire
- Ray conceived and fully built in-house by Inversion
engineers
- Mission will validate key technologies for next-generation
vehicles
- Milestone launch follows $10 million seed fund raise
Inversion, founded in 2021 to build re-entry vehicles to deliver
cargo anywhere on Earth in under one hour, announced today that
Ray, the company’s technology test platform, will be launching on
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 as part of the Transporter-12 Rideshare mission,
no earlier than October 2024.
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Inversion's Ray Reentry Demonstrator
Capsule (Photo: Business Wire)
The purpose of Ray’s mission for Inversion is to test key
technologies for the yet-to-be-announced next generation vehicle
that Inversion is developing.
“We have developed Ray at a record low cost, while
simultaneously making investments into our next gen vehicle. Ray’s
first mission is a major step on the path to making returning from
space an everyday occurrence. This ethos of cost efficiency is core
to accomplishing this mission,” said Justin Fiaschetti, Co-Founder
and CEO of Inversion.
Once in space, Ray will remain in orbit while the Inversion team
conducts functional check out. Upon completion, Ray will be
commanded to conduct its de-orbit burn using Inversion’s 8 lbf
thrust bipropellant rocket engine, named CE-1. Ray will then
re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, 17800 mph.
Ray will deploy its parachute, which Inversion has developed from
scratch, to slow to a gentle 12.5 ft/s touchdown velocity and
splash down off the coast of California.
“We decided early on that Ray would be used to test technology
for our next gen vehicle, which is why we’ve developed nearly every
one of Ray’s subsystems in-house for both the capsule and the
service module. This sets up Inversion to develop our future
vehicles faster, ultimately speeding up our vision of space
becoming a transportation layer,” said Austin Briggs, Co-Founder
and CTO of Inversion.
Inversion’s mission is to make space the fourth transportation
domain alongside land, air and sea. It is the only domain that does
not interface with sovereign borders, giving unheard of advantages
to those who embrace it.
About Inversion
Inversion was born in a Los Angeles garage in 2021 with the
mission of making space a transportation layer for Earth by
building low-cost re-entry vehicles. Inversion has raised $10
million of funding to date. Rapid scale up of its talented team and
5,000 square foot facility in Torrance, California quickly
followed. Inversion Co-Founders, CEO Justin Fiaschetti and CTO
Austin Briggs, were named to Forbes 30 Under 30 for their vision,
expertise and commitment to shaping the space industry’s future.
Learn more: https://www.inversionspace.com. Follow Inversion:
https://twitter.com/InversionSpace,
https://www.linkedin.com/company/inversion-space/.
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240417687782/en/
Media: Pat Weigold 201-787-7030 cell
pat.weigold@inversionspace.com