👀 Does this actually make sense? Let's take a closer look 👇

The Arc Orbital Capsule by Inversion Space is a floating body or reentry capsule that uses aerobraking and a parachute to re-enter and land. Inversion promises delivery of anything anywhere on Earth within an hour. While initially advertised for crisis response, the target market is obviously defense.

Some are already trying to sell this as the perfect opportunity to deliver, say, unmanned ground vehicles, to remote areas rapidly.

I see a couple of issues with the concept:

1️⃣ Space: LEO and VLEO are becoming congested. The other day a Starlink sat almost collided with a Chinese one.

2️⃣ Money: might seem irrelevant for the US, but for sufficient coverage, putting hundreds or thousands up there will cost multiple hundreds of million or billions.

3️⃣ Value: how helpful is it to drop yesteryear's UGVs on Penghu for a hundred million dollars when half of them are getting shot out of the sky, most of them are giving away your position and all of them are out of date? Because for thise rapid deliveries to work, the kit already needs to be in the sky.

Alternatives like the U-Hawk, which has a range of 3.000km, and can transport a multitude of the newest kit from carriers or friendly bases, or a fleet of USVs, which come with comparable ranges and large capacity for transports nowadays, seem like a better use of budget. The same is true when delivering anything from ammo to meds. This doesn't mean that there's no use case for systems like the Arc, I just see the potential demand as inflated.

The dream of global delivery of cargo using rockets is as old as rocketry itself, but so far, a concept that is both economically and technologically feasible and desirable in a defense economic context has yet to be proposed.

Space warfare, on the other hand, is evolving very rapidly, and nations which don't invest into the right capabilities (and quantities and qualities) NOW might be denied a place at the table in the near future. If you'd like to know what it takes to be a true space military power in 2026 and beyond, and how, for example, Germany's plans stack up against what the great space military powers are bringing to the table, then I recommend you take a look at the latest TECH WARS Deep Dive: Germany's Rise as a Space Power? In it, we're dissecting which capabilities make sense and which doesn't when building towards a space military, in an unfair comparison between the capabilities of the United States and Germany's ambitions.

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