Special Delivery
It’s the circle of life: tech bros get millions to fund their overzealous startup, and people on Twitter mock their goofy and often impractical ideas.
That’s more or less what happened to Inversion Space, a flashy Y Combinator-incubated startup that’s raised $10 million in seed money.
The New York Times profile about the company’s bold proposition — to shoot goods into space, store them indefinitely in orbital capsules, and then fire them back down to the planet below on demand — was torn apart on Twitter almost immediately after being published this week.
In the NYT interview, Inversion Space’s youthful cofounders described applications of their company’s wild idea ranging from sending artificially-fabricated human organs directly to operating rooms to getting a pizza from New York to San Francisco within just 45 minutes.
Idea Pollution
Online pundits, however, weren’t impressed by the proposal.
“Please stop polluting the universe with your dumb ideas,” The New School anthropology professor Shannon Mattern decried.
In another exchange, two space reporters — SpaceNews‘ Jeff Foust and CBS‘ William Harwood — questioned the startup’s acumen.
“Unfortunately, I doubt that high-speed transcontinental pizza delivery is going to be the killer app for the space industry,” Foust argued.
“For real,” Harwood replied .
Secondhand News
All said, these jibes are unlikely to harm Inversion Space in the short term, given the considerable amount of interest it’s already raised among investors.
The company is hoping to kick off operations with a test launch in 2023 and operate at full capacity by 2025.
It’s not the dumbest concept we’ve heard of to have raised significant amounts of money — but it’s satisfying, nonetheless, to see people who are experts in their field bring startups like Inversion Space down a metaphorical notch.
READ MORE: Weird Startup Proposes Dropping Artificial Human Organs from Space