Rapid Intercontinental Delivery.
Sensitive Parcel or Crew Transport from London to Seoul in ~90 minutes — over the edge of space.
ASTRID (Advanced Suborbital Transport for Rapid Intercontinental Delivery) is our lifting-body spaceplane that fits inside commercial launch providers' fairings — or launches with its own propulsion — climbs past the Kármán line — 100 km up, the edge of space — and glides back down to a runway on the far side of the world. Suborbital point-to-point, with nothing thrown away.
Today, we are setting the new goal for the future of Orchestr Aerospace.
Why fly over space?
Since 2022, war has closed the skies. With Russian airspace shut to most carriers and conflict across the Middle East, Europe–Asia flights now detour thousands of kilometres around the fighting — London–Tokyo has stretched from under 12 hours to more than 14. Every reroute burns more time, fuel, and crew hours.
Kármán line · 100 km
ASTRID flies over the problem. Above the Kármán line (100 km / ~62 mi) you are no longer within any nation's sovereign airspace: under the Outer Space Treaty, outer space is free for all and not subject to territorial claims. A suborbital hop crosses continents and conflict zones alike — no overflight permits, no detours — following the straight great-circle line airliners are no longer allowed to fly.
Rapid cargo & crew (planned) delivery
Instead of a capsule's parachute-and-splashdown impact, ASTRID glides to a soft runway landing under gentle g-forces — delivering time-critical cargo and, in the planned crewed configuration, people, intact. Built for airliner-level reuse: land, refuel, fly again. Cargo delivered whole — without the risk of damage or destruction in transit.
Propulsion & crew safety
For simplicity and reliability, ASTRID's propulsion runs on storable hypergolic propellant — it ignites on contact, with no complex ignition system. The planned crewed variant steps up to a cryogenic-hydrogen fuel system with air-breathing VOILÀ engines for the atmospheric phase, plus ejection seats for crew safety.
Estimated crossing times
Project ASTRID is an experimental airframe under active development; figures are engineering estimates, not commercial schedules. “ASTRID” refers to Orchestr Aerospace’s lifting-body program and is unrelated to any similarly named aircraft or product.
Avionics
Jeb's 3D Flight Bag on Web, iOS & Android
The full Orch Avionic EFB in your flight bag — moving map, NEXRAD, Orch Vision AHRS, and route planning, on iOS and Android. Pairs with an existing Sentry® or any qualifying external ADS-B device like Stratux for live traffic and weather.
Orch Aerospace is not affiliated with Sentry or Stratux. Sentry® is a registered trademark of its respective owner; Stratux is an independent open-source project.
Moving map with Orch Vision attitude indicator
EFB-1
Introducing Orch Avionic 1 EFB.NEW
Your Predictive* Copilot
in GA Flying.
ADS-B, GPS, Handheld Radio, Fuel Calculation and Flight Charts.
All in one form factor.
Our state-of-the-art computer vision traffic detection runs on the Jetson Orin Nano with a stereo camera module — YOLOv8 via TensorRT identifies aircraft, helicopters, drones, birds, and ground vehicles in real time, while stereo depth estimates range in meters. ADS-B depends on GPS, and with signal jamming on the rise in conflict zones worldwide, purely transponder-based traffic awareness has a single point of failure. Our vision system works independently — no GPS, no transponder, no internet required†.
MK. 1
Above image is our Mark 1 pathfinder model.
Final product may differ in shape or form.
Sales expected to begin in November 2026.
Flight Test Platform
C-FPIO
nicknamed “Piper Astrid”
Airframe
Piper Cherokee 140
Powerplant
160 hp
upgraded from the base 140
Role
Avionics System Demonstrator
“Piper Astrid” is our Piper Cherokee 140 with a 160 hp engine upgrade — the platform we fly, measure, and validate our certified avionics on, in real-world conditions.
Gallery
Advisory and educational only — always refer to the aircraft POH. Piper and Cherokee are trademarks of Piper Aircraft, Inc.; Orchestr Aerospace Inc. is not affiliated.
VATRADIO · ATC Intelligence
Bringing AI toAir Traffic Control.
As the skies grow more congested, we bring the current power of large language models (LLMs) from machine learning to the field of air traffic control.
AI-based
Traffic Flow Management
AI-based
Flight Following
One example — potentially offloading the workload of busy controllers.
A second set of eyes.
Brain–Computer Interface
DEEPBCI®
We bring brain–computer interface (BCI) to manned and unmanned aircraft — for cockpit controls and beyond.
Just imagine.
Control an aircraft with your thoughts. A non-invasive BCI head interface reads your motor-imagery signals; a Fly-by-Large-Action-Model layer — fly-by-wire 2.0 — filters out noise and turns intent into safe flight commands.
3D head scan for a custom head interface
A non-invasive BCI needs every electrode touching the scalp. Our iOS app uses the iPhone’s TrueDepth / LiDAR sensors to build a real-time 3D model of your head, exportable as OBJ — so we can design a custom-fit head interface for each pilot.
Engine in Development
VOILÀ
A combined-cycle engine in development at Orchestr Aerospace. In the atmosphere it breathes air like a jet; higher up it switches to closed-cycle rocket mode to push past the Kármán line. One engine, runway to space — the heart of ASTRID's planned spaceplane.
Orch A320 Checklist
iOS & Android appA comprehensive, interactive Airbus A320 cockpit reference and checklist app featuring an explorable 3D cockpit model with 35+ labeled instrument targets.
Normal & emergency checklists, approach procedure guides, FMGC operations reference, full POH data, and detailed instrument system guides.
...Replaces a Level D simulator
APPLE VISION PROOn Apple Vision Pro the A320 cockpit becomes a 1:1 immersive walk-around. Look at any cyan marker — the part highlights, an info card appears, and you walk through the same checklists, emergency procedures, POH and FMGC steps you'd run in a Level D full-flight simulator costing $20M and a $400/hr time slot. It's a technology demonstrator for how we'll train our ASTRID pilots.
Development Phase
Proving it, step by step
ASTRID and VOILÀ begin as a development program, not a finished vehicle — validated at small scale before scaling up.
Drop & glide tests
Air-drop subscale ASTRID gliders to validate the aerodynamics, stability, and unpowered runway landing — released from an Embraer EMB 110 Bandeirante, an affordable Brazilian twin-turboprop available on the civilian market.
1/10-scale flight tests
Flight-test 1/10th-scale models of both the VOILÀ engine and the ASTRID spaceplane, carried on small commercial launch vehicles such as Rocket Lab's Electron or Firefly Aerospace's Alpha, before scaling toward the full design.
Orchestr Aerospace is an independent developer and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Embraer, Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace, or SpaceX. Product and company names are trademarks of their respective owners, referenced only to describe candidate test aircraft and launch vehicles.
Inquiries
ORCHESTR AEROSPACE INC
DEEPBCI, INC
contact@orchestrsim.com