Using a planet’s atmosphere to secure a satellite’s place in orbit, a process known as “aerocapture”, has been the dream of flight engineers for decades. The only problem? It’s really hard to actually do. It requires control systems, thermal management, and orbital mechanics to all coordinate in a dance that allows a spacecraft to not just slow down while passing by another planet (or moon in some cases) but to start to orbit it without the use of lots of additional propellant. For now, that remains a dream, but a recent NASA contract to a California start-up called Inversion is another step towards making it a reality.

Inversion itself was started by former engineers from SpaceX and ABL Space to design orbital reentry vehicles - specifically ones that are designed to deliver mission critical cargo, such as vaccines or biological samples, or key military equipment to an isolated area, that would benefit from the much shorter travel times that orbital flight allows.…