Inversion Space

Inversion Space is an American aerospace and defense company that builds reentry vehicles for delivering cargo from orbit to the ground. It was founded in 2021 by Justin Fiaschetti and Austin Briggs, who started the company in a garage before moving into a 55,000-square-foot facility in Los Angeles, California, where it is now headquartered; the company also operates a test site in the Mojave Desert.

What the company builds

Inversion's first spacecraft, Ray, was a subscale technology demonstrator that launched on SpaceX's Transporter-12 rideshare mission in January 2025 to test reentry hardware on orbit. Its successor, the Arc reentry vehicle, is a larger, reusable lifting-body design intended to pre-position cargo in low Earth orbit and bring it back to a precise landing point on Earth. The company has said Arc is also intended for hypersonic flight testing, given its ability to sustain high speeds and g-loads during reentry.

Where things stand

Inversion has raised a seed round and a Series A, and has been awarded a contract from the Space Force's SpaceWERX programme to support reentry vehicle development. The company has also been selected to take part in Kratos' MACH-TB 2.0 hypersonic test programme and has partnered with NASA to study aerocapture, a technique for using a vehicle's own aerodynamics to enter orbit without expending propellant. Arc's first orbital mission has not yet flown.