The U.S. military has recently given $100 million to startups Inversion Space and Outpost Space to develop a reusable re-entry system from orbit. In fact, this is the development of a system for landing cargo from orbit to a precisely defined point on the Earth’s surface.
Cargo return system from orbit
It was recently reported that the U.S. military was very interested in developing systems to return cargo from Earth orbit. They even funded two startups Inversion Space and Outpost Space for a total of over $100 million to work on the idea.
The task of returning a vehicle from orbit to Earth is not as simple as it may seem. It needs to reduce the speed it has, and it needs to do this mostly by friction against the air. And this means creating a heat shield that will keep the payload from burning up during this process. And of course parachutes or jet engines are needed to ensure a soft landing.
The development of all this for important cargoes is handled by the two companies above. The military funded the work through the Strategic Funding Increase (STRATFI) program. It used to allocate relatively small amounts of money of $15 million, but now it has allocated much more.
Inversion Space received $71 million. The main focus of the company’s work is the return of cargo from orbit, which may previously have been in space for many months. Outpost Space is developing something that will provide cargo return for hypersonic vehicles and they have been allocated $33.2 million dollars for this.
Why the military is interested in orbital landings
The U.S. military is interested in cargo return systems from orbit for a reason. Of course, officially it’s mostly about satellites and the results of experiments that need to be delivered intact to Earth for further study in the lab.
But they challenge developers to ensure reusability of the capsules and landings in a specific area. All of this suggests that this is about dropping important cargo from orbit.
The U.S. military really has such a program. It is called Rocket Cargo and involves the delivery of cargo over long distances using rockets. It could provide transportation of several hundred kilograms of cargo, for example, from the U.S. to Ukraine only a few tens of minutes after the start, but so far remained only theoretical.
According to spacenews.com
