Everything is Logistics
A podcast for the thinkers in freight. Everything is Logistics is hosted by Blythe Brumleve and we're telling the stories behind how your favorite stuff (and people!) get from point A to B.
Industry topics include freight, logistics, transportation, maritime, warehousing, intermodal, and trucking along with the intersection of technology and marketing within the industry.
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Everything is Logistics
Building Warehouses in Space with Inversion
In a recent episode, we talked about a company trying to build the next shipping container and since y’all liked that episode so much, we got the CEO of Inversion Space to come on and talk about how their company is creating the next supply chain, all in space.
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And if you look across like the millennia, transportation modes have very much defined eras of humanity, whether it was when the first ocean going ship was built, or, you know, transcontinental railroad, or when aircraft that could fly across oceans were finally popularized each time, what happens is that society gets closer together, right? The world shrinks in some ways, where, you know, in 24 hours, I could be anywhere on Earth right now, but like, what about in one hour? How does that change the world? That's what I'm most excited about. And what kind of gets us out of bed in the morning to go and build inversion welcome
Blythe Brumleve:into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. My name is Blythe Milligan, and we are proudly presented by SPI Logistics. And in this episode, I am happy to welcome in Justin Fiaschetti. He is the CEO and co founder of Inversion Space, and we're going to be talking about building the next shipping container and transporting it to and from space, which is super exciting. And then obviously, you know, very, very relevant to this show, especially after doing our NASA series that debuted in August. And so as a little bit of a follow up, we've kind of talked about your company Justin on a recent episode, and was able to get connected with you and have you on. So I'm pumped to have this conversation. All that to say, welcome.
Unknown:Yeah, thank you for having me on. Really excited to talk about this logistics is like, what makes the world tick, and we want to bring a new modality to that. So excited to share more about inversion and what we're building, and
Blythe Brumleve:I have to ask just like, off the off the RIP, like this feels like the most exciting, like, just space in general, feels like the most exciting industry to be a part of right now. Is that a similar feeling for you? I would imagine,
Unknown:yeah, there's a lot of really cool stuff happening right over the last 10 years or so, getting to space has become very available, you know, mainly thanks to SpaceX and then bringing the cost of launch down, but also the frequency of launch, right? They're flying, you know, every other day, every every three days, something like that. And so there's been this kind of explosion of of entrepreneurship in the space industry. A lot of people coming from SpaceX, a lot of people based in Los Angeles, and it's a really cool domain to operate in, right? There's kind of a very high risk, high reward aspect, where you can only test in space by going to space, right? You can't do stuff on the ground fully to see if it works, or you can test a little bit, but at the end of the day, you put it in space, you see if your thing works, and then if it does. You know, that's a really big reward for stuff.
Blythe Brumleve:So how did you take me back to sort of that light bulb moment for you that you decided that, because I don't believe you have a history in in or a career history in, in logistics. So how did you know that this was some a problem to solve, yeah. So
Unknown:we founded the company about, or we came up with the idea for the company about about four years ago at this point, and it was myself and my co founder sitting around after dinner one night. We were doing the dishes, and honestly, we were just kind of talking about, like, what is coming next in the space industry. We were both working at rocket companies at the time, and what we realized was that space as like, kind of like a platform, offers the value of being able to cover the whole globe with very little infrastructure. Right? Two use cases right now for space are communications from space, I think, like satellite internet, Starlink is a, is a kind of the prevalent example or Earth observation, right, taking pictures of the Earth. And so really, what those are taking advantage of is very few things can cover the entire globe, including remote areas, at a cheaper and faster rate than you would be able to do terrestrially. And so what they're returning is data, right? They're returning, they're returning bits right, information. And we asked ourselves, Well, what if you could return atoms back? And the kind of way we came up with the exact idea is a little funny. It was wildfire season in Los Angeles, right? The sky was like, red from all the smoke. It was raining ash. And I asked my co founder, I was like, hey, what if we could drop water on wildfires wherever they started, you know, in a very short period of time, put them out before they got big. We've quickly realized that wouldn't totally work, because you need a lot of water to do that. But then we started realizing, well, hey, like you can, you can store cargo in space and have it that piece of cargo have access to the entire globe and land it very quickly, and you can by doing so create, create one hour delivery to the entire globe. So that's kind of where inversion got started, is we decided to go and build fully autonomous re entry vehicles that can store cargo in space and then on demand, deliver it to any. We're on Earth. And so the way it works is you take these, these re entry vehicles, you load them with the cargo on the ground, you launch a bunch of them into space, into low earth orbit, and then when and they kind of just sit there, they just hang out there until they're needed. And then once they're needed, you give them a GPS location to go and land at, and they'll fly fully autonomously and land within 50 feet of accuracy.
Blythe Brumleve:The re entry vehicles are almost the warehouses that are in space. It's not necessarily like that. You have a warehouse that you're building in space and you're shipping goods to and from it, the entry vehicle acts as the warehouse. Correct? That's
Unknown:exactly right. Yeah. Imagine that the shipping container is also the way you store your cargo around the globe, right? And that shipping container can get moved wherever it needs to get moved to, yeah. And
Blythe Brumleve:so with the, I guess, the cargo delivery, because at first, I believe you're focusing on, you know, sort of a department defense or disaster logistics, healthcare related items in an emergency remote areas, I believe as well, is that an accurate statement? Yep, that's
Unknown:where we're starting off, because the main kind of thing we focus on at the company is providing enough value for the cost that this is and in all of those settings, even today, with current prices of getting to and from space, those those closed from a business model perspective. But as we bring that cost down through reusability, through just mass manufacturing, you start to open up many more markets as well that just want to have the ability to access the whole globe very
Blythe Brumleve:quickly. And so it's probably, though, those high revenue items, like you said, stuff that you're probably going to make, you know, money off of, so that you can be profitable, so that you can continue to, you know, run a business. And so for, I don't imagine, or do you imagine, that, you know, that's going to be like, I don't know, delivering sunglasses to, you know, my backyard one day that that's, do you see that as like a future likelihood or Probably not, because of the the cost associated with it.
Unknown:So when we think about the like, terminal cost of this, right? Where is this going to end end up, we expect that it will actually be at roughly the same increment as going from shipping by boat to shipping by plane as it will shipping by plane to shipping by space, right? It'll be like roughly that amount of Delta, and it will be actually even faster as a percentage basis in time between space delivery and aircraft delivery. So, you know, do we deliver sunglasses by planes today, like we don't, right? We deliver, like, big, you know, high priority items, whether that be mail or or overnight shipping, right? But you we've gotten to the place as a society where the speed of shipping by plane people are willing to pay for just because it's faster, right, not because they necessarily need that that item in a shorter period of time. But it makes more business sense, it makes more personal sense to have that cargo shipped by air freight rather than by by ocean freight. And we expect that same thing to happen. So is it sunglasses? My bet would be like and kind of like those kind of level of consumer goods sometimes, I would say sometimes, if it's really high priority, right? Sometimes I'll have, you know, I guess no one would have thought 30 minute delivery of food would be something people would be willing to pay extra for, when you could just go and drive to get the food. But turns out, people love convenience. But I think that what we're building is a new platform, right? It's a new method of delivery. And there will be a lot of new business cases that we can't even conceptualize today that will come up because of this. Right? If you go to a bunch of entrepreneurs and say, you can touch anywhere on the globe in an hour, what can you do with it that's really exciting, like, I'm pumped to hear about what that what comes from that?
Blythe Brumleve:Are you in freight sales with a book of business looking for a new home, or perhaps you're a freight agent in need of a better partnership. These are the kinds of conversations we're exploring in our podcast interview series called The freight agent trenches, sponsored by SPI logistics. Now I can tell you all day that SPI is one of the most successful logistics firms in North America who helps their agents with back office operations such as admin, finance, it and sales, but I would much rather you hear it directly from SPI freight agents themselves. And what better way to do that than by listening to the experienced freight agents tell their stories behind the how and the why they joined SPI hit the freight agent link in our show notes to listen to these conversations, or if you're ready to make the jump, visit SPI three, pl.com, so her a big moment. I guess that happened in shipping is sort of the standardization of the container, and using the container, you know, for. Cargo ships to that can go on to trucks. I can go on to trains. I'm curious if the some of the reentry vehicles, are they going to be sort of standardized, or what do those re entry vehicles look like? Because I believe you you have Ray and then you also have arc, can you kind of, I guess, break down what the standardization looks like, and maybe those different types of reentry vehicles that you're building?
Unknown:Yeah. So Ray is our tech demonstrator. It's gonna be launching in the next few months to space and landing off the coast of California, really just meant for internal technology development, getting data on all of our systems that we can then go and apply to arc. And arc is kind of our main product, and we're really excited about that. It'll be launching for the first time in 2026 and that is what goes and does that precision landing and global delivery of cargo as it currently stands. You can think about the re entry vehicles. I would call it like a Ford Transit van, right where you can store stuff in it and you can deliver it together. And that's like a good way to go right now, just because the economics of how expensive is to put stuff in space at the moment favor that kind of like delivery and storage at the same time. And so, like, we're a little early to start standardizing the actual container inside of the reentry vehicle, right? A reentry vehicle, you can generally think about is, it's like the equivalent of like a train or a truck or a boat, right? Is it? Is it? Is the method of movement, right, rather than the method of storage at a high level, we are combiding those two to start right. We are saying we're going to have a payload bay inside of the reentry vehicle. That is standard, but it is intrinsic to the re entry vehicle. It is removable, you know, to some extent, right, to access the cargo, but the cargo is not meant to be necessarily stored inside of the payload bay independent of the re entry vehicle. Right? There's power constraints, that there's power hookups or software hookups, there's mechanical hookups that required the reentry vehicle to start. But that will probably change. It will probably change over time to where there are various different sizes of re entry vehicles. There are various different types that you want, a standardized set of cargo, so that the high value, expensive thing, which is the re entry vehicle, compared to the halo container, can be separate and they can be interchangeable. So you can have five reentry vehicles and 50 payload bays with different types of payload. But to start the overhead and the like total, like capex, to build out that method would be too high, and so you start with that kind of for transit van, where can do both
Blythe Brumleve:that that's, I guess it's really reassuring to me, because I was thinking before this interview that there was going to just be a bunch of just giant warehouses up in space. And, you know, as someone who you know, I think a lot of us all love, you know, gazing up at the stars. And there's, you know, kind of a little bit of controversy around a lot of the satellites that are going into space, and they're messing up, you know, the star gazing. And I just thought to myself, well, what if we have all these, you know, big ass warehouses in space, and then there's blocking it even more. So it this. It makes me feel better about the whole, you know, just like, I guess star gazing ability is that you won't have, well, maybe you will have giant warehouses in space. I imagine that's kind of what the ISS technically is, even though the humans can live on it as well,
Unknown:yep. And, I mean, I'll give an example here, right? So the International Space Station is, you know, could be that giant warehouse, right? And then you might have, like, smaller re entry vehicles that pop off of it. The International Space Station was $100 billion to build, right? And so that's going to be a longer term thing, right? We'll get to that eventually. To start, we'll have those the capsules have the cargo itself. But the International Space Station is about the size of a football field or so, which is roughly the size of like Airbus, a 380 right, the largest airplane that you have flying. But the International Space Station is really far away from you, right? It's about 307 or 75 to 400 kilometers away. So it's tiny. It looks tiny compared to an airplane flying over top of you. And there are, at any given time, 5000 10,000 airplane in the sky, and that's not a huge deal for start, for stargazing, right? And for astronomy, it has some impact, but not a huge impact. So we actually think that from from that perspective, it will end up being even more favorable, because just so far away, and they're relatively small, compared to, you know, the moon or something, right?
Blythe Brumleve:So I'm, I'm curious as to because, especially for logistics, I've been working logistics for, you know, a little over a decade now, and it's seen sort of this tech evolution, especially since COVID, you know, when the world shut down, and everybody kind of found out, you know, how important supply chains were or are. And for, I think for a lot. Folks within the industry, especially a lot of the veterans, they are apprehensive to new technology, to to change I'm curious if I'm wondering if maybe your advantage of not working in logistics has helped you create a new logistics company, because you were almost on the outside looking in were any, like logistics professionals or veterans consultants kind of helping along the way with, you know, it's sort of the early days of inversion, or even now, or, or is it really just been like, what can we think of that's new, and let's, let's carve this new path. Yeah.
Unknown:So, um, you know, we have, we have a lot of folks we talk to and I try to learn from, like, literally every place I possibly can. We try to take lessons from existing logistics systems and things like that. But especially on the military side, we have, like, a lot of folks we talk to on how they do logistics and how they do, you know, global force projection and that kind of stuff at a fundamental level, like logistics today are almost entirely about cost reduction and timeliness, right? Like, the way that you win is a business in logistics is you are like, two or 3% cheaper than the next person, and then, like, and maybe you run like, a little bit better at being on time, which is, like, fine, because, like, airplanes are commoditized, boats are commoditized. Like that is, that is like, we are at a technological limit effectively on all of those systems, right? Yes, there are some things you can do to optimize, but, like, the built world is, is really great at moving cargo right now in large masses. Our perspective is generally that, like, if you can do something with the old paradigm, you should do it with the old paradigm. Like, if you could do global delivery of cargo in under an hour, like, with an aircraft, like, you should probably go do that, because it's gonna be, like, easier and like, they already exist. And you don't have to, like, reinvent the wheel, but like, fundamentally, it is not possible, from a cost or a time perspective to have that fast of access to, you know, middle of the ocean, remote areas and broadly just you would otherwise have to have an entire global supply chain as an individual user, right? Whether that be the military Red Cross, whomever, um, and so. So what we are offering is, like, at a fundamentally a different optimization than what current logistics optimize around. Yes, we need to reduce costs as much as possible. Um, we're not fighting for percentage points, right? We're fighting for like, 10x speed reduction, or, you know, increase in speed we're fighting for, like, can we cut the cost in half in the next two years? Can we cut it by 10x in the next 10 years? And as such, like, our volumes also aren't high enough right now that, like, you know, traditional logistics planning methodologies work super well. Like, how do you distribute like, 15 things around the globe, right? Like, that's a lot simpler of a problem than, how do you distribute like, 50,000 you know, shipping containers around the globe, or however many there are, is probably more than that. It's my guess. So we think about it a lot that way, but fundamentally, we're not trying to build technology to solve or to be better at an existing thing. We're trying to build a new capability for humanity, and that does require some technology innovations to go and do,
Blythe Brumleve:yeah, I mean, as you were talking, I was just thinking of, you know, obviously, the the disaster that just happened when, after Hurricane Helene, and you know, there's so many people that are stranded on tops of mountains and, you know, roads you can't get to these people. And you know, sometimes they're, they're trying to do, you know, helicopter flybys and things like that. And so is that a situation where a company like inversion could come in and drop some much needed supplies in areas that are greatly impacted where traditional transportation methods just don't work? Yeah,
Unknown:absolutely. You know, the nice thing about what we're doing is the cargo is location agnostic. So if it's a hurricane in, you know, in North Carolina, if it's an earthquake in, in Japan, if it's if it's a tsunami, you know, somewhere, generally you need food, you need water, you need medical supplies, right? And you need, like, some sort of shelter or power to to or for heat. And so we don't need to pre plan where that cargo is going to get delivered, because we won't know, right? And so we can be very responsive in those settings where, hey, there is a lost hiker right in the middle of Alaska, or something like that, and they probably need roughly the same cargo as you know, the strand. Family from a hurricane. And our goal is to make it so that whenever that happens, right, we can bring it, bring that cargo, down and support them. Now, right now, it's too expensive to do that for an individual to pay for that right? We wouldn't expect that to be a great business model for you or me to you know, constantly have access to that cargo. But what we can do is basically distribute the costs, right? So, you know, just like triple A is a distributed cost, where if you need roadside assistance, great, you can get it, but you don't have to pay for the, you know, the tow truck always, right? You can share that cost with a bunch of people. And that's also kind of how Red Cross operates, a little bit, right, where you and I could benefit from Red Cross, but we don't have to necessarily fund the whole organization ourselves, and we see that as being especially on the kind of disaster relief, humanitarian relief side of things, how that will generally work, where there's a collective payment in order to deliver supplies to individuals.
Blythe Brumleve:What does walk me through the process of, say, I'm, I'm a Department of Defense, you know, worker, or maybe, you know, disaster logistics worker. Do I am I? Am I booking a load? Am I? Am I tracking the load? Like? What does the whole like, I guess, start to finish process look like?
Unknown:Yeah, so from our perspective, or from, sorry, from the customer's perspective, the Department of Defense or the Red Cross worker, all they do is they say, they say, inversion, we would love to have this type of cargo be able to access in these areas at any given time, right. They hand us the cargo, and then we say, Great, let us know when you want it right. And then they tell us when and where they want it, and they will get it right. We take care of all of the all of the logistics of mounting the hardware in the vehicle, or, sorry, the kind of cargo in the vehicle, launching it, monitoring it while it's in space, doing any sort of debris avoidance that we have to do. And then once they need it, we tell that piece of cargo, that re entry vehicle to come down and land where they asked it for. So we want to abstract away all the complexities of operating in space for our customers, right? A good analogy here is the internet, right? It used to be that you had to be an internet company to use the internet, right? You had to have, like, an IT staff and like like software or like developers and like to have an internet presence, anything like that. But now every single company is an internet company, right? Nike sells tons of shoes online, but they're not. You wouldn't consider them a tech company or an internet company, necessarily. And so that's kind of our goal. Is that everyone is using space as a cargo delivery method doesn't mean they have to be a space company, just like they don't need to be an air, you know, an airline company today, to ship cargo, you know, via DHL or FedEx or whatever.
Blythe Brumleve:And is it the same kind of cargo in each re entry vehicle, or is it different cargo for different purposes? Like, you know, Department of Defense probably has, you know, maybe theoretically, 15 of their own, that they can put whatever they want in. American Red Cross has, you know, their own, that they can put that, you know, their own supply in. Or is it just, you know, IV bags all in one or something like that,
Unknown:yeah. So, so each type of cargo would have multiple reentry vehicles that it's in so that you have that kind of coverage, right? It's like a network of those capsules to make sure there's one over top of everywhere at any given time. So let's say I would have, you know, a set of capsules, a set of re entry vehicles with, you know, IV packs. I have another set with, you know, radios, and another set with communications equipment, and they would all be in space, and they would kind of be their own network, basically.
Blythe Brumleve:What about the, I guess, the cargo on re entry? How do you know if it gets damaged, or if I don't know, like radiation affects it? Or that question actually came from a friend of the friend of the show, Thomas Watson, who's also a logistics professional and content creator. So he was really excited about this interview as well. And that was his question is, what happens to the cargo on re entry of you know, is it insurance involved in this process at all? Yeah.
Unknown:So there are kind of three phases of flight for the cargo. There's the launch while it's on the rocket. There's the staying in space until it's needed. And then there's the re entry. Each phase has slightly different challenges that we try to take on as inversion so that the cargo doesn't have to worry about it. So for launch, for example, it's very high vibrational environment, right? It gets shaken around quite a bit, and so we dampen the payload as much as we can to make sure that the cargo doesn't see any more vibration than it would on like a truck getting shipped across the country, which actually has surprisingly high vibrational and shock loads. I was surprised at that once you're in space, now you're looking at, okay, radiation, temperature, pressure, that kind of stuff. And our payload bay is pressurized. It has 10. Temperature control. Has humidity control, we use, like, a dry nitrogen so that you don't have any oxidation, and it has radiation shielding to the extent that's needed. So our goal is, like, it's literally just a warehouse on the earth, except it happens to be in space right on the radiation point. A good example is, you know, we have people and cargo up in space currently, for, you know, extended durations, on the International Space Station, there's a very thin shell of aluminum that is what protects it from any sort of damaging radiation. And so we have blood in space. We have, you know, we have medical supplies in space. And NASA signed off that all of that is totally good for all of their astronauts, and that will be the same for this cargo once you then reenter, once you kind of enter the atmosphere. Now you have to deal with the heat of re entry, right? It gets very hot, you know, surface of the temperature of the surface of the sun on the outside of our vehicle, and so we have special thermal protection materials that surround the reentry vehicle to make sure that that temperature doesn't get into the cargo. And we also can do an actively, an actively chilled system for the cargo. Once you land, you just grab it as if it was, as if it was dropped from a drone,
Blythe Brumleve:and it's dropped via a parachute, right? That's right, yeah.
Unknown:So once we've kind of, once the reentry vehicle has entered the atmosphere, and we've start to get, you know, close to the ground. Call it like 10 to 15,000 feet. We deploy a parachute, and the parachute is steerable, just like skydivers parachute might be. And so that lets us do that kind of very accurate, targeted landing, rather than, like, if you just have, like, a big, round parachute, it could drift if there's winds or what have you. And because we land under parachute, rather than like, you know, using like wings and a runway, like a like a space plane might, or having a rocket engine that fires to slow us down because we're under parachute, we can land near people. We can land in austere environments, so we don't have to have a landing site necessarily perfectly clear, and because it's steerable, we can avoid obstacles like trees and that kind of thing.
Blythe Brumleve:So is it just kind of someone sitting in an office, maybe with like a VR headset on that steering the parachute? Or how does that work? How does it steer? Yeah,
Unknown:so it's actually fully autonomous. Arc does it all on its own. So arc has a bunch of sensors on board to know where it is, where it is in the world, to know how far it is off the ground. To know where things are on the ground, we use a combination of computer vision and classical classic like guidance, navigation control systems in order to like land super accurately. And you can adjust the landing site if you have to, and so it can, like, divert to a different spot if you happen to move or or if the landing site is no longer is no longer viable, and then flies, and we do this cool maneuver at the end where we like, flare the parachute so that we softly touch down, just like a skydiver kind of runs out there. They're they're landing, and that means that the cargo doesn't have like a big load when it hits the ground.
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Unknown:us? Yeah, so, you know, in space right now, there's kind of a, you know, a big kind of realignment where we space is no longer a peaceful like there's no one else that can touch our satellites. It's what's considered a contested environment. Now, you know, countries like China and Russia have the capability to shoot down satellites. China has the capability to move satellites. And so that's a that is a that is a problem that every space company is wondering about and looking at at a fundamental level, though there it's really no different than if you have like cargo on an island somewhere or in a base somewhere, right? You have people know where it is, and you need to make sure that you can either move it quickly, if they're coming to grab it, or. Make sure that they don't know where it is as easily as as other cargo might be. So there's not like it's I think it's less of a risk than what most people would expect. The other thing is, because we have, like, a network of capsules. Sorry, I use capsules and re entry vehicles interchangeably. So sorry, if that's that's been confusing to listener, because there's a network of them. Like, if one gets captured, like, there's another one that's coming, like, 20 minutes later, and so it's very difficult to, like, capture all of them. Yeah,
Blythe Brumleve:because that was, I was watching this document, and I'm not sure if you, maybe you've seen it the wild wild space, or, I think it's wild space that's on HBO, and it's a really interesting look into what's kind of the unregulated environment of space and how it really is like the Wild West. Have you seen that documentary
Unknown:yet? I haven't seen that. Is that the one with like, Rocket Lab and Astra is, am I thinking of the right one? Okay, cool. I saw a bunch of stuff on Twitter about it, but I haven't seen it personally, but I'm quite familiar with those companies. So yes,
Blythe Brumleve:it's it's very fascinating look into just sort of the business of space and how it's evolving so quickly. And one of the crazier stats is that we have about 8000 I think, satellites in orbit, lower Earth orbit right now, but in the next 10 years, they estimate it to be over 100,000 and so it's just this, this, I guess area, it's almost like Antarctica, where you're the whole bunch of, you know, it's sort of the global nations are going to have to come together and make some kind of a loose agreement. And so it's a little surprising that they don't have that yet. But I imagine it's probably going to take something happening in space, I think, for all of these countries to kind of wake up and maybe come up with that, yeah, it's, it's one of those things where I think it's, I don't know if I want regulation, and then I don't know if I do want regulation. It's kind of like that, that middle ground of where policy sort of stands, and I imagine that, you know, sort of working with the government on these things. Is it, are they excited about going into space and, like, space logistics and things like that, or is it just become like another part of, like, a necessary part of the program for them?
Unknown:Yeah. So, you know, space has become kind of like this, this really exciting thing within the Department of Defense. Obviously, the Space Force was stood up maybe three or four years ago at this point. And so people are really starting to understand that space influences all aspects of the Department of Defense, whether it's, you know, GPS or communications or imaging for understanding, you know, troop movements and things like that, and cargo delivery, like I was kind of explaining at the beginning, is really just a another evolution of of what's already being done right right now we're taking pictures and transmitting that back to back to the ground. Now we're just going to store cargo and transmit that back to the ground, like I mentioned earlier, also like fundamentally, there's no other way to move as fast as you can and access as many parts of the globe, as quickly as delivery from space Chem. And so the Department of Defense has, like, a number of programs that are that they're talking about and have made announcements about around like rocket cargo and space delivery and that kind of stuff. And so I think people are really starting to understand, like, Oh, this is, like, a very valuable capability. And it's the kind of capability that once you have, it's kind of hard to go back from right, like, as in, like, once you are able to access the whole globe in under an hour, you never want to give up that capability. And in fact, everybody else now needs that capability too. Because, you know, if the US can access or maybe just one part, like, let's say the Air Force can access every part of the globe in under an hour. Well, the Navy is going to want to be able to do that too, and so is the army. And then our allied nations are going to want to do that as well, right? The US, or, sorry, the UK, Australia, Japan, those types of countries are going to want to be able to maintain kind of parity of capability. And so just like once the aircraft was invented and introduced, it was kind of like, yep, we need this, and we're always going to have it, because it's so valuable. That's happening right now with with delivery from space.
Blythe Brumleve:One of the things you mentioned earlier in from what I understand, there are companies now that do this, that track debris that are in space. And I just think that's so it's so crazy how the parallels of logistics and tracking that are right here on Earth are following us up into space as well. And so I'm curious, how do you account for space debris? And you know, something as small as a screw that could damage, you know, one of your vehicles. Or is that even a worry?
Unknown:Yeah, so it's less of a worry than you would think. The debris is roughly, pretty well tracked, and it's very predictable, like orbits are very predictable for the most part. Um. You can project months in advance if you're going to have a conjunction event. We have our arc vehicle has propulsion on it so it's able to move within its orbit. And so it can, it can, like, raise its orbit, can lower its orbit to avoid any debris that it might be coming up against. And so, like, space debris is this kind of like, it could be very scary, but it is. It is it is manageable. Just like having, you know, 1000s of airplanes flying around would have been very scary if there wasn't, like, you know, flight corridors and altitude requirements and stuff like that and all of that is kind of starting to get put in place just kind of by, like de facto, like, it's not necessarily, like being mandated, but people are being very careful about where they're putting stuff for the most part. So unless there is, like a major, major event, and even if there is a major event, it only causes issues in like, a single orbital plane and at like, specific altitudes. So it's not like all of space is then just like completely destroyed. It's more like, it's more like, you know, this one area has, like, this one area within an orbit has a bunch of debris, or, you know, contamination. And so you just don't put stuff there until it degrades. But the other final point on debris is like, well, yes, it takes a while space debris orbits, they degrade, so it will eventually enter the atmosphere. And so as long as you stay low enough that happens in like a, like, a relatively reasonable time, like five to 10 years. So it's kind of like self cleaning. When you get higher altitudes, it like, never comes down. And that's kind of a problem. But yeah, we think about debris, not a ton, and it's also nice, because we bring everything back with us. So we're never, like, leaving stuff up in space. So we think that that's going to probably become some of the norm in the future. It
Blythe Brumleve:is kind of crazy how shipping lanes are evolving up into space. And I didn't even think about the different sort of orbital paths. I just thought, you know, once you're in the lower earth orbit, like everybody's kind of in the lower earth orbit, but that would make sense that if, if it's going to burn up eventually for a lot of that debris.
Unknown:Yeah, yeah. Like, you can think of low Earth orbit as, like, the Pacific Ocean, right? And like, within the Pacific Ocean, there's a bunch of different shipping lanes. There's, like, generally understood of, like, where you go, where you don't go, if you're about to have a collision, you're like, you know, who, who is responsible for correcting similar same stuff in space. What
Blythe Brumleve:about on the maintenance side of things? You know, I from watching, you know, sort of infrastructure being built in in space. One of the the bigger sort of light bulb moments for me was learning about, you know, different companies that are actually repairing satellites in space. Is what happens if one of, you know, an arc goes down. Can you perform that kind of maintenance on it in space? Or is that something where you would have to almost maybe transport it back, or just burn it up in orbit? Or what happens there?
Unknown:Yeah, so, so for arc, if something goes wrong, depending on how critical, we'll generally just bring it back to landed in the US and recover it, refurbish it and re fly it, right? Let's say, like, you know, one of the sensors goes bad, or something like that. That's pretty easy and straightforward to do. Like, maintenance on satellites is an interesting topic, and we could go down a huge rabbit hole here, but you have this problem where the cost of the because you need another satellite to go maintain the original satellite right, and you need to launch that other satellite. And so then you start asking the question, Well, why don't I just launch a new one of the satellite that I have to go and fix, right? And so, like an analogy would be like, imagine if you needed an ocean liner to go and fix an ocean liner in the middle of the ocean. But once you fix that first ocean liner, that maintenance ocean liner, is no longer useful. It's like, well, why wasn't that ocean liner just itself, the thing that, why was the maintenance one itself, the valuable and usable system? So I actually maybe slightly different than the industry, like, don't believe in, like, satellite maintenance and low Earth orbit for, like, further orbits, it might make sense. But there's this weird economics thing, which is, like, it's easier just to, like, fly a new one, right? And it's like, cheaper to go and fly a new one. And usually the sensors will have been, like, upgraded enough that you want to put a new one up anyway. Very true. So, but for arc, because arc is able to come back, we can reuse it, right? And so now you start to look at, well, now I like for context, satellites are all single use today, right? You put them up, they last for a few years, five years, something like that, and then you have to put a new one up and like, that's like, continuously happens. Yes, for arc, though, we can put it up after five years, we bring it back, we refurbish it, and we can fly it again. So now you have that same piece of hardware being used, you know, four or five times. It actually brings the cost per mission down substantially compared to just a single use satellite.
Blythe Brumleve:Yeah, I think it's the reusability of items going to and from space and in space, I think has been the biggest game changer, especially with SpaceX and Rocket Lab. How do you are those? I believe those are the two companies that you use to that inversion uses to launch into space, correct?
Unknown:Yeah, so we're flying on SpaceX for our first mission, for Ray's mission that's coming up soon. We haven't we've yet to announce who we're flying with, with arc in 26 so that should be coming soon, though.
Blythe Brumleve:How does it for folks who may not know? And I'm wondering if this may be true for for your future. You know, instance, is that, from what I understand, you can just talk to SpaceX, and then they send you a link to book a flight, to go into space, and then you, you book it, you pay for it all online, and it takes about 15 minutes.
Unknown:Yep, no, exactly. I forget the URL. Otherwise I would, I would give it right now. It's like SpaceX slash, like launch, or SpaceX slash, like ride share. I think like that. And you can literally go in and put your credit card info. I think it's, I think you put your credit card info in. It's literally that simple. There's some like, back end paperwork that happens afterward, but they've streamlined it a ton. It used to be that, like, you had to know someone at NASA, and NASA had to, like, do this whole, like, whole like, prioritization and stuff. But with SpaceX is pretty great. You like, go and you book your satellite, and once you book it, there's like, testing and stuff, and like making sure that your satellite will break apart on launch and hurt other satellites in the rocket itself. But they've made it, like, super streamlined and super straightforward. I think there's still, like, a lot of improvement that could happen generally. This is kind of like v1 of that, you know, our goal is a similar thing, which is like you go online, you book it, and you literally just hand us the cargo and we take care of everything else. SpaceX isn't quite like that, because they serve other space companies, so there's not a need for them to do that, but we want to make it so anyone can put cargo in space and have it delivered when they need it, without consideration for any of the space aspects of it.
Blythe Brumleve:Oh, that. That's super interesting. So you, I would imagine you would have a facility here in the United States where you're storing some of these goods before they're added to to one of the the vehicles before it's launched.
Unknown:That's right, yep, exactly, exactly. So we would have it where, you know, you know, Red Cross. Let's just use them as an example. Would give us a bunch of cargo, give us a bunch of pallets, and we do have an integration facility, probably on the West Coast, maybe on the East Coast, we would integrate their cargo into our arc vehicle. We would then put arc onto like a SpaceX rocket, and then watch the space.
Blythe Brumleve:What's been the most challenging part of this whole journey for you that was maybe also surprising, that you didn't think was going to be that challenging. Yeah,
Unknown:I think that, like, just generally, space is a hard place to build a company. Like, if you're building a software company, you can, like, write the software, make it kind of work, launch like, you know, deploy it, and have customers start to use it and test it and upgrade it over time. Space. You don't really get that opportunity. You kind of get that one shot, right? You get one launch. And everything has to work. And so there's a lot of stuff that has to come together, right? There's 1000s of parts of the vehicle all have to come together at the same time. So supply chain is a big problem on that, making sure that you're you're getting parts at the quantities you need, when you need them. If we have a three month delay, a month delay on a single part, we're not flying right? And so I think that the the biggest surprise was how different building a hardware company and a space company is then building like, you know, some AI company or software company, right? I envy them, because they can go on and online and just like, buy more servers with AWS and now their main asset is scaled like you can't just do that in in a hardware business, right? You, it takes time to build stuff. And so that is always an interesting thing compared to some of the other other startups that we spend time around. Yeah,
Blythe Brumleve:I just did a, I just did an episode on the on the company Hadrian, who is trying to, you know, reinvent American manufacturing using a combination of legacy knowledge from those older workers that are going to be retiring soon with automation and robotics, and they're focusing on the same industry. So aerospace, Department of Defense these, you know, the source of the source of the product these lead times is just some. Thing that, or the is a complaint that I've heard in that store or doing research for that story, is that it's a problem just in, just across all industries, but it appears to affect the space aerospace the most is that just a outside perception.
Unknown:No, I think that's like roughly correct. And the reason is that there's very few suppliers for space rated hardware, like all like most space electronics, as an example, have to be like they're different than what you would use in like a phone or like a like a car or something like that. You can sometimes get away with automotive grade components, but you generally don't. The other thing is, because the environments are so intense, all of all of your materials, have to have like material certifications all the way back to the mind they were mined at right? So you need to be able to track everything that whole way. So you can't just go buy some, like a random aluminum from Home Depot. And so Hadrian is a good example. They're a great company where they deal with a lot of that, getting that metal and then machining in a very precise way such that it can be reliably work how you intend it to work, as the designer of it. So part of the reason that that is is that the space industry, while each unit is generally very expensive, right? Each satellite could be up to a billion dollars, usually around nowadays, around 15 to$20 million each. There's not many, like 8000 is a lot of satellites. But like, 8000 cars is nothing, right? 8000 phones is nothing. 8000 aircraft even, is basically nothing. And so you're, you're just volumes are so low that, like a supplier might produce like a like 100 valves a year, right for a satellite, or for various different satellites, and if they've, if they've sold all 100 of them, it's going to be another year until you have another 100 or so. So you're kind of just dealing with this, like low volume, high value aspect, where every single component is like that, rather than, like consumer electronics, where, like a touchscreen is made in the millions. There's really not many things in the aerospace industry made in the millions quite yet.
Blythe Brumleve:Are there any other, you know, sort of cool startups outside of your vertical that are doing cool things in space, or really interesting things in space, yeah.
Unknown:I mean, there's a lot of folks doing a lot of cool stuff, you know, everything from like asteroid mining, which is like, you know, is like a crazy endeavor, which could turn out to be very cool to more satellite communications. Like, at a fundamental level, you have to ask the question of like, what is the end customer for something you're building in space? Because there's a lot of people that want to build cool technology, which is great, but who's actually buying it right now, there's only two demonstrated business models that are don't rely on the government, and that's internet and Earth observation. Everything else is like a one off NASA mission or something like that. Like even the International Space Station is like, just funded by NASA. So there are companies that are starting to build, like, commercial space stations for space tourism and like that might be, that might become a big thing. But a lot of the a lot of the companies right now are just trying to innovate on the two existing verticals of internet and Earth observation, or pictures. And so there's this kind of new crop of of satellite imaging companies that use synthetic aperture radar. Basically, it allows you to have, like, it's a new, a different way to take pictures. It allows you to have, like, way more fidelity in the image, as well as see through clouds and a bunch of cool stuff. And so that's starting to get we were talking about that kind of, like, getting 5% better, 10% better, and that wins you the market. Those are starting to get to that place where, if you're 5% you know more resolution on your pictures, or if you are, if you can see through 10% more clouds, like you start to win that market. And so it's kind of interesting seeing that different stages of the of the space industry at different maturity levels, where, you know, imaging is probably the most mature, then internet is probably the second most mature. So, and then where we're going, which is delivery is kind of at this nascent stage that has a lot of potential, and it's kind of like ripe for the taking,
Blythe Brumleve:where give us a sense of what the company inversion looks like. I know you're based on the West Coast. Are you doing West Coast launches? I think you said maybe Florida. What does it the team size look like? Can you kind of give us that, that eagle eye view? Yeah,
Unknown:absolutely. So we've been around for about four years now. We are, we are about 35 people today. We're. Only up to about 100 or so in the next 12 months, we're based in, based in Los Angeles. I'm actually in our new facility, which we're really excited about. So we have one facility in Los Angeles, and we have one out in Mojave desert, where we own five acres of land. We do all of our testing. So we do, like, rocket engine testing, you know, explosion, explosives testing, that kind of stuff out there. We launch and land right now out of the west coast, but eventually we'll be launching out of basically every launch site that people operate out of, whether that be in in the US or overseas landing. Right now we'll have our first vehicle ray coming back from space in, like, end of January or so, with the launch coming up in the next few months, and that will be that kind of first proof point, first time we've gone to space as a company and come back. We recently got our regulatory approval to do so, so within the kind of like, re entry world or launch world in space, getting FAA approval to do that is, like, a huge deal. Like you might have seen that Space X was blocked from launching their starship rocket for like, many weeks because the FAA was not approving them, and we were lucky enough to get that all finished up well before our launch slot. So, yeah, we're scaling, we're building, and we're only flying one ray vehicle that is, again, just a very much a tech demo, just for us internally to get as much knowledge as possible and as much data as possible. And we're already kind of midway through the work on arc, which will launch for the first time in 26
Blythe Brumleve:that's awesome. Is there, is there any anything else that you think is important to mention that we haven't already talked about?
Unknown:Um, I don't, I don't think so. I think that, like the the high level of inversion is eventually you will see re entry vehicles coming down to earth, shrieking across the sky, as much as you see airplanes right now, and we will think nothing of it, right? It will just be a normal occurrence. And if you look across like the millennia, transportation modes have very much defined errors of humanity, whether it was when the first ocean going ship was built, or, you know, transcontinental railroad, or when aircraft that could fly across oceans were finally popularized. Each time, what happens is that society gets closer together, right? The world shrinks in some ways, where, you know, in 24 hours, I could be anywhere on Earth right now, but like, what about in one hour? How does that change the world? That's what I'm most excited about. And what kind of gets us out of bed in the morning to go and build inversion? Yeah,
Blythe Brumleve:it's definitely something that is super exciting. I mean, I know there's, you know, a lot of Doomers who look at stuff like this, and they are almost a little scared of it, but it's, it's one of those things where it's the age of, I think, new exploration, and for our species to be able to continue to push the boundaries. I mean, there's no other places to discover on Earth except for, like, the bottoms of the ocean, and who knows if we're going to do that, but out into space is sort of that next frontier, and I find it incredibly exciting and fascinating, and really appreciate your time today and sharing your expertise and insight on building out this new shipping container in space. And so Justin for the audience, where can they learn more about inversion? Where can they connect with you? You know, all that good stuff. Yeah, yeah.
Unknown:Inversion space.com, that is kind of like where we have everything, and then on Twitter, I think we're at inversion space, and I'm at JC fachetti, yeah.
Blythe Brumleve:Well, that's awesome. This is a great conversation. So thank you so much again, and hope to continue to watch inversion grow in the future.
Unknown:Yeah. Thank you so much. It's been fantastic.
Blythe Brumleve:I hope you enjoyed this episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight, telling the stories behind how your favorite stuff and people get from point A to B. Subscribe to the show. Sign up for our newsletter and follow our socials over at everything is logistics.com and in addition to the podcast, I also wanted to let you all know about another company I operate, and that's digital dispatch, where we help you build a better website. Now, a lot of the times, we hand this task of building a new website or refreshing a current one off to a co worker's child, a neighbor down the street or a stranger around the world, where you probably spend more time explaining the freight industry than it takes to actually build the dang website. Well, that doesn't happen at Digital dispatch. We've been building online since 2009 but we're also early adopters of AI automation and other website tactics that help your company to be a central place, to pull in all of your social media posts, recruit new employees and get. Potential customers, a glimpse into how you operate your business. Our new website builds start as low as $1,500 along with ongoing website management, maintenance and updates starting at $90 a month, plus some bonus freight marketing and sales content similar to what you hear on the podcast. You can watch a quick explainer video over on digital dispatch.io, just check out the pricing page once you arrive, and you can see how we can build your digital ecosystem on a strong foundation. Until then, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'll see you all real soon and go jags. You.
