Rapid Intercontinental Delivery.
Autonomous Payload and Crew Transport from Ottawa to Seoul in ~90 minutes — over the edge of space.
ASTRID (Advanced Suborbital Transport for Rapid Intercontinental Delivery) is our autonomous 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, fully reusable.
So this is the full stack for the Orch Pathfinder model.
Rapid cargo 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 intact. Built for airliner-level reuse: land, refuel, fly again. Cargo delivered whole — without the risk of damage or destruction in transit.
Propulsion & reliability
For simplicity and reliability, ASTRID's propulsion runs on storable hypergolic propellant — it ignites on contact, with no complex ignition system.
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 Flight Computer 1 in your flight bag — 3D terrain map, international weather radar, 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.
3D terrain map with Orch Vision attitude indicator
The Brain
Introducing Flight Computer 1.NEW
Replacing the decades-old Autopilot System with one that sees.
ADS-B, GPS, Handheld Radio, Fuel Calculation and Flight Charts.
All in one form factor. Plus Vision-based Traffic Detection and Alert System.
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†.
C-FPIO
Flying Laboratory
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 experimental and 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.
Toronto Centre, Air Canada 510 — in the Detroit area,
AI-based
Traffic Flow Management
AI-based
Flight Following
One example — potentially offloading the workload of busy controllers.
Live speech-to-text of VHF radio demo.
Brain–Computer Interface
DEEPBCI®
We bring brain–computer interface (BCI) to drones and piloted 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.
Next-Gen Checklist
iOS & Android appThe checklist app for ASTRID. It walks a crew — or the team on the ground for an uncrewed flight — through every step of running the spaceplane, from pre-flight to landing, on an explorable 3-D cockpit you can look around.
Normal & emergency checklists, approach procedure guides, FMGC operations reference, full POH data, and detailed instrument system guides.
How we train our pilots for ASTRID
APPLE VISION PROA Level D simulator is the highest-fidelity trainer there is, and nobody has built one for a vehicle that leaves the atmosphere — there is no motion platform that can reproduce a climb past the Kármán line, re-entry, and a runway landing in one box. So we build it differently. Apple Vision Pro renders the cockpit at 1:1, and our proprietary vestibular stimulation technology from DEEPBCI® supplies the sensation of motion and g-force. That costs a fraction of a Level D simulator, and it means we do not have to build another test aircraft to train on — the real airframe stays on the ground, unworn and out of harm’s way. All of it applies both to remote operation of the ASTRID spaceplane and to the crewed configurations we plan next.
Independent Engine Research
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.
A separate research track toward future reusable vehicles — independent of ASTRID's current storable-hypergolic propulsion.
Development Phase
Proving it, step by step
ASTRID begins 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 Stratolaunch, flying out of the Mojave Air and Space Port.
1/10-scale flight tests
Flight-test 1/10th-scale models of 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 Stratolaunch, 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