Our Company
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Our Story
Orbital Arc’s roots lie in the circuitous journey of its founder, Jonathan Huffman. Jonathan has been a life-long space nerd, but with education in business, and experience primarily in life sciences consulting, he had somewhat abandoned the possibility of working in the space industry.
But fate had different plans; for fun, Jonathan wrote a time travel story online. The story caught the eye of a videogame developer, who offered him a side gig as a world builder for a sci-fi game. In that role, his job was to envision (as realistically as possible) the trajectory of technology from today to a time when there are aircraft-carrier sized space robots flying around shooting each other so that players could have a good time.
It takes a lot of thrust to move a carrier. One of the technologies Jonathan envisioned was a thruster based on a linear particle accelerator, which used relativistic mass expansion to vastly increase the effective mass of fuel flowing out of a thruster compared to the rest mass of the fuel actually carried on board the ship. He called this concept a Relativistic Ion Thrust Drive, or RIOT Drive for short. Though his work on the game ended, the idea of the RIOT Drive stuck with him, and he went down the research rabbit hole.
Jonathan quickly concluded that his initial idea would definitely not work; linear accelerators rely too much on beam containment systems, which packetize their ions, creating a fuel throughput limitation. But, with prior exposure to mass spectrometry from his life science consulting work, he hit upon an idea to use field effect ionization to generate ions cold, and then immediately accelerate them without containment, eliminating the bombardment problems faced by current designs. If it worked, it would let ion engines scale to match whatever power supplies may become available in orbit, possibly revolutionizing space travel.
After a year and a half of studying, reading hundreds of research papers, and doing a whole lot of math, Jonathan concluded that the concept was not only viable, it could probably be built (mostly) in his garage.
The rest is history. Jonathan convinced his wife (it took some convincing), invested his savings, quit his job, and got permission from his friends at the game company to use the RIOT Drive name.
And Orbital Arc was born.
Our Mission
Orbital Arc believes that the arc of human civilization will see us living and working in orbit, and throughout the solar system, but technology needs to develop to make that future real. One of the key technologies, we believe, is the one we are inventing: a thruster so efficient that delta-v ceases to be a limiting factor in mission design, and power becomes the only meaningful limit on the application of thrust.
Our first step will be to make the RIOT Drive a reality, but our real mission is to help create the logistics capabilities to extend sustained human presence throughout the solar system. Humanity needs thrust sufficient to mine asteroids and return thousands of tons of material from them to cislunar space and other destinations. We need spacecraft that can change orbits hundreds of times without refueling to capture and manage space debris, or run station-keeping operations for decades at a time. We need to shorten transit times between celestial bodies from months or years to days or weeks to minimize cosmic radiation exposure if we want humans to make those trips.
High thrust spacecraft operating at incredible efficiency are essential for all of these activities. Orbital Arc wants to build those craft. The engine is the first step of a very, very long journey.
Other companies are focused on launch. Rightly so; getting a critical amount of upmass capability is crucial. Our view is longer, though. Once we get to space, what can we do?
The way we see it, even the sky is no limit.
Our Team
Founder & CEO
Jonathan Huffman
Jonathan is a life-long space nerd, with an MBA with four concentrations in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Sustainability, and Consulting, from University of North Carolina, and 6 years experience as a management consultant with CREO Inc, a life sciences consulting firm. He is also a writer, and is the sole inventor of the RIOT Drive technology.
Lead Engineer
Andrew Dougherty
Andrew holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering and is earning a double MS in Aerospace Engineering and Space Architecture from University of Houston. His prior experience includes work with NASA in the Artemis Program prototyping lab, and at Leidos supporting a microgravity fluid mechanics program. He describes himself as a “plasma physics hobbyist.”