Intermodal Space

Overview

Passive-container logistics for Earth orbit and, on a longer horizon, cis-lunar space. Thesis: smart endpoints, lean containers. Two solar-powered fixed vehicles — a dispatching Hub and a receiving Catcher — linked by beacon-guided ballistic containers that coast between them on Keplerian transfers. For the canonical 100 km co-orbital release the required Hub Δv is 5.87 m/s prograde, transit is exactly one orbit (94.6 min at 500 km), and 10,000-trial Monte Carlo puts the 3σ miss distance at 36 m inside a 40 m capture aperture — 99.9 % capture rate. Whitepaper v1.1 (April 2026) is public and reproducible. The paper roadmap points at a 2028–2029 LEO demonstration; realistically this is market-gated, not tech-gated — the commercial window opens when there's enough cis-lunar infrastructure (crewed lunar bases, regular resupply cadence) to generate continuous shipment demand, and that's a 5+ year horizon. Solo, pre-seed.

Gallery

How it works

1. 01Three-vehicle architecture: HUB-1 MERIDIAN (smart dispatcher, ~300 kg dry, 2 kW solar, piezo-tuned release cradle with 0.5 mm/s Δv repeatability), CARRIER-1 PALLET (lean 150 kg container — beacon + small solar array + ~0.3 m/s cold-gas trim, ballistic during transit), CATCHER-1 APEX (active receiver, closed-loop relative-state filter, four-phase capture: glide rail → eddy-current brake → mechanical latch → cargo transfer).
2. 02Physics is textbook Clohessy–Wiltshire in the small-separation regime — the co-orbital release is a closed-form prograde pulse at the Hub and a one-orbit rendezvous regardless of transfer distance. Required Δv scales linearly with distance: 0.59 m/s at 10 km, 5.87 m/s at 100 km, 29.4 m/s at 500 km. All six tested distances close at exactly one Hub period.
3. 03Monte Carlo validation with 10,000 trials per distance at the v1.1 error budget (0.5 mm/s Δv magnitude, 0.02° release pointing per axis, 0.5 m Hub position knowledge, 0.5 mm/s Hub velocity knowledge, 1 mm container CG offset). 3σ miss distance stays in a flat 34–38 m band across 10–500 km transfers; capture rate is ≥99.9 % across the whole range inside a 40 m aperture. Sensitivity analysis isolates release Δv magnitude and Hub velocity knowledge as the two dominant error sources.
4. 04Build split is intentional. The defensible engineering surface is exactly two subsystems: the Hub's piezo-tuned release cradle and the Catcher's eddy-current magnetic brake plus closed-loop relative-state filter. Everything else is COTS smallsat hardware (Blue Canyon XACT-50, Honeywell HG1930, NovAtel OEM719 GNSS, Honeywell HR0610 star tracker, Syrlinks EWC27 S-band, Xiphos Q7/Q8J, Busek BHT-100 Hall thruster, VACCO MiPS cold-gas).
5. 05Not a launch company. Hub and Catcher are payloads on existing commercial launchers (Falcon 9/Heavy, Vulcan, New Glenn, peers). Containers reach LEO as rideshare payloads, get handed to the Hub, and transfer passively to their destination Catcher. The customer pays the commodity launch price once; everything after handoff is capital-amortized operation of the network.
6. 06First-order economics: Dragon cargo ~$45,000/kg, active tug rideshare (Momentus, D-Orbit, Impulse, Kurs Orbital) $10,000–30,000/kg, Intermodal Space target $2,000–5,000/kg at 2 shipments/week/Hub with 24-month Hub amortization. Per-container target cost is $500K on first flight → $100K in a batch of ten → $25K at steady-state fleet volume.
7. 07v1.1 whitepaper is public and deliberately auditable. It flags and corrects a sign-convention bug in v1.0 (the co-orbital pulse is prograde, not retrograde — a retrograde pulse drives the container forward of the Hub under the secular CW drift term). All numerical claims reproduce from a Jupyter notebook in under five minutes on a laptop; the "how to break it" section lists adversarial checks that should fail the model if it's wrong.
8. 08Paper roadmap: TRL 2 today (physics + whitepaper), TRL 3 breadboard Q4 2026 (release actuator + optical Δv measurement at sub-mm/s precision), TRL 4 subsystem demo in 2027, TRL 5 ground demo of the full release-capture sequence in 2028, TRL 6 LEO demo in 2029. Real-world timing is more patient than that: the architecture needs actual cis-lunar demand to justify a fleet, and that waits on crewed lunar bases + recurring resupply showing up at scale. 5+ years is the honest number.
9. 09Cis-lunar horizon is the long-term market, explicitly scoped as a v2 research programme rather than a v1 claim. A cis-lunar Hohmann from LEO to lunar orbit needs ~3.1 km/s, three orders of magnitude larger than co-orbital. Three open architectural options: Hub-mounted kick stage refueled from an in-space depot, an electromagnetic mass driver at the Hub, or a momentum-exchange tether. A rigorous Δv and dynamics treatment of all three is the v2 paper's job.
10. 10Market-gated, not tech-gated. The co-orbital physics is inside the envelope of today's space-grade hardware — the paper argues this from first principles and reproducible Monte Carlo. What isn't here yet is the demand: until there are crewed lunar bases, an operating Gateway-class station, or regular cis-lunar resupply cadence, nobody needs a reusable logistics network badly enough to justify paying for one. The plan is to stay lean, keep advancing the paper and the hardware as budget allows, and be ready when the market catches up.
11. 11Rebranded from Axiom Transit → Intermodal Space to avoid overlap with Axiom Space; the original site at axiomtransit.space stays live as a reference. Solo, long-horizon, pre-seed.

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