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LAKE ELSINORE, California — The mission to transform space to the next frontier for express deliveries began from a modest propeller plane over a remote runway in the shadow of the Santa Ana mountains.

Shortly after sunrise one Saturday, an Inversion Space engineer, a start-up just one year old, launched a flying saucer-like capsule through the open door of an airplane flying at 3,000 feet. The 20-inch-diameter capsule tumbled through the air for a few seconds before a parachute opened, bringing the container upright for a slow landing.

“It was slow to open,” said Justin Fiaschetti, 23-year-old CEO of Inversion, who watched the parachute anxiously through the viewfinder of a long-lens camera.

The exercise seemed to be the work of amateur rocket enthusiasts. But actually, it was a test run for something more fantastic. Inversion is building earth-orbiting capsules to deliver goods from space anywhere on Earth. To make this a reality, Inversion’s capsule would traverse the earth’s atmosphere at around 25 times the speed of sound, making the parachute essential for a soft landing and undisturbed cargo.

The reversal is betting that as flying into space becomes cheaper, government agencies and corporations will want to not only send things into orbit but also bring it back to Earth.

Inversion aims to develop a four-foot diameter pod that carries a payload equivalent to the size of several carry-on luggage by 2025. The company hopes that once the capsule enters orbit, it can travel to or stay on a private commercial space station. In orbit with solar panels until recalled to Earth. When it’s time to return, the capsule can exit orbit and reenter the atmosphere.

The capsule would deploy a parachute to slow its descent and land in an area within a radius of tens of miles from its target location. The company plans to have a smaller 20-inch-diameter demonstration capsule ready by 2023.

If the inversion is successful, it’s possible to imagine hundreds or thousands of containers floating in space for up to five years – like some (really) remote storage cabinets.

The company’s founders envision the capsules could store artificial organs delivered to the operating room in a matter of hours, or serve as mobile field hospitals that would float in orbit and be sent to remote areas of the planet. And one day, a shortcut through space could allow for unimaginably fast deliveries, like getting a New York pizza to San Francisco in 45 minutes.

Inversion’s founders feel that what seems like a pipe dream may be more realistic as launch costs have come down from current prices, which start at $1 million (and increase with weight) for a SpaceX rocket share space. Inversion declined to offer an estimate of how much its capsules would cost.

“The biggest hurdle everyone in the industry is trying to overcome is that, at current costs, there isn’t a lot of demand to do much in space,” said Professor Matthew C. Weinzierl, who publishes research at Harvard Business School. about the economic potential of space.

For decades, people have dreamed of living and working in space as an extension of life on Earth. This vision seemed like a Hollywood fantasy until the influx of private rocket companies drastically reduced the costs of going into space and made commercial activities beyond Earth more affordable.

The cost of launching one kilogram, about 2.2 pounds of payload, into space has dropped roughly 90 percent over the past 30 years. SpaceX Expected to further reduce costs with Starship, the next generation rocket is still in development. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said he expects launch costs for the massive rocket to be under $10 million in three years – compared to the $62 million advertised price for launching the company’s widely used rocket, the Falcon 9.

To make space more accessible than it is today, launching rockets is only part of the equation.

Another important factor is the facilities in space. Last year, NASA selected three companies to receive funding for commercial space stations as part of its plan to eventually replace the International Space Station. A fourth company, Axiom Space, received a $140 million contract in 2020 to build a habitable module attached to the ISS.

Fiaschetti, who interned at SpaceX last year before dropping out of school to pursue his own startup dreams, thinks physical goods, not just satellite data, can be sent back from space.

The main cargo of rockets today is satellites that remain in space. Vehicles carrying humans or experiments from space are large, over $100 million, and often work in conjunction with a particular rocket. Inversion said it has designed its smaller capsules to fit into any commercial rocket so they can go into space often and cheaply.

What Inversion is trying to do is not easy. Designing a vehicle for reentry is a different engineering challenge than sending something into space. When a capsule enters the atmosphere from space, it travels at such high speeds that it is in danger of being burnt – a major risk to both human travelers and valuable non-human payloads.

Seetha Raghavan, a professor in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Central Florida, said that as the vehicle size gets smaller, it will be even more difficult to deal with the heat, vibration and deceleration of the capsule.

“Everything gets harder when you have a smaller item to control,” said Ms. Raghavan.

Inversion’s plan for orbiting capsules raises questions about whether satellites could contribute to the congestion in space, which is already an issue in mega-constellations. The abundance of satellites interfering with observations of planets, stars, and other celestial bodies has been a common complaint among astronomers.

But Inversion said it uses materials to make its capsules significantly less reflective to reduce visual pollution. In addition, the company said that its capsule will come with systems that prevent debris and collisions in orbit.

Mr. Briggs and Mr. Fiaschetti, 23, met when they sat next to each other at a graduation ceremony for freshmen at Boston University. They became active in the school’s Rocket Propulsion Group, which worked on rocket designs. They moved to Los Angeles during the pandemic. One night they were discussing the future of the space industry – “We are nerds. That’s what we’ve been doing,” said Mr. Fiaschetti, and they’re focused on creating cheaper re-entry vehicles to transport cargo from space.

They moved into a guesthouse in Los Angeles’ San Pedro neighborhood, paying $1,250 a month each, including use of a garage that had become the company’s workshop. Using Mr. Fiaschetti’s woodworking equipment, they designed and built an aluminum-powered rocket engine to prove to potential investors that they had the necessary technical specifications.

In June, Inversion Space joined Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley startup incubator known for its early investments in Airbnb and Stripe. Five months later, Inversion said it had raised $10 million based on $225 million worth of letters of intent from potential customers interested in reserving space in its capsules. Mr. Fiaschetti refused to reveal the identity of the customers.

Venture capital began to see potential of space. Globally, venture capital firms invested $7.7 billion in space-related technology last year, up nearly 50 percent from the previous year, according to data compiled by. introduction book.

Inversion moved into a 5,000 square foot warehouse in an office park in Torrance. It is a mechanic’s dream workshop with machining tools to make parts, welding equipment and a 20 tonne hydraulic workshop press to densely pack parachutes up to oak.

At the far end of the warehouse – next to a floor-to-ceiling American flag and a basketball hoop – is a black 10-foot shipping container for testing rocket engines and parachute insertion mechanisms. The building has steel-reinforced concrete walls, ceiling sprinklers, and a system to replace oxygen with nitrogen in case of fire.

During a recent visit, Inversion was preparing to test a new parachute design. Parachutes are tough. To make sure a pod slows down and doesn’t shake too much, they need to be opened perfectly. Many factors such as fabric selection and sewing design can affect the effectiveness of the parachute.

While most rocket companies outsource parachute design and manufacture, Inversion sees it as an advantage to build their own rockets.

In a previous test, Inversion noticed that the capsule was too much released. That day, Mr. Fiaschetti, Mr. Briggs and two engineers had arrived before sunrise last Saturday at an airstrip used largely by skydivers to test a new design.

Connor Kelsay, an engineer who oversaw Inversion’s parachute design, climbed onto the plane with a GoPro camera and a test capsule attached to an inertial measurement unit to measure its movements. After throwing the capsule from the plane, he waited a few seconds and then jumped. Mr. Kelsay, an experienced skydiver, turned around the capsule and captured video of the capsule’s movements from another camera in his helmet.

When he landed, he shared the same observation as everyone else: The parachute was slow to open. The team quickly scanned the video and came up with a list of possible factors. Did Mr Kelsay launch the capsule too hard? Was there too much turbulence when the drop occurred? Is it because they used a different shaped pod last time?

In the second test, the parachute opened as expected. However, the GoPro camera taped to the capsule fell during the descent, causing a frenzied search. (They finally found it.) After the second test, the team thought they had pinpointed the problem: An adhesive cloth tape used to patch a hole had caused the parachute to stick.

Later, Mr. Fiaschetti said he was not disappointed with the slow opening of the parachute because it was part of the process.

“Early in development, you expect things to not go as perfectly as you would like,” he said. “I guess that’s why they call the hardware ‘fixed technology’.”