VO-M/01
Icarus Ascent
0.3 AU · solar observatory
A heat-shielded observatory diving closer to the Sun than anything ever flown — reading the corona from inside it.
StatusPerihelion 12
VANTA ORBITAL flies solar-sail freighters, crewed clippers and deep-field probes from a single mission control — sunward first, then everywhere else.
Five programs in flight right now — scroll and the manifest drifts past like cargo on the gantry.
A heat-shielded observatory diving closer to the Sun than anything ever flown — reading the corona from inside it.
Twelve autonomous solar-sail freighters on a continuous loop, moving 400 tonnes of cargo per synodic period.
A swarm of 60 microsats cataloguing metal-rich asteroids — the mining map the next century will be built on.
The fastest crewed run in the system: 94 days pad-to-pad. Redline carries relief crews and the mail that matters.
Our farthest machine: a nuclear probe past the heliopause, whispering back data from between the stars.
The flagship of the crewed program. Twin fusion torches, a spun crew carousel and the record for the fastest Earth–Mars crossing ever flown — twice.
A two-square-kilometre photon sail with a cargo spine at its heart. No fuel, no crew, no hurry — Ember rides sunlight itself and never stops for anything.
Built to do the one thing every engineer said was impossible: fly at the Sun and keep flying. A ceramic aeroshield, a folded heart of instruments, and nerve.
Dawn launches only. The pad faces east, the Sun does the rest.
The thirteenth freighter unfurls its two square kilometres over the Pacific.
Six aboard, six home. The 94-day record gets one more attempt on this window.
The deepest solar dive yet: 0.28 AU, straight through an active region.
Twenty more microsats to push the asteroid map past the halfway mark.
Our second starward machine. Destination: nothing, forever. That's the point.
Crew applications for the 2027 class open this autumn. Pilots, engineers, physicists, welders — the corridor needs hands.