Varda Space Industries is finally able to celebrate. For nearly eight months, the in-space manufacturing company’s first mission was essentially stranded in low-Earth orbit, but not because of any technical malfunction or a restriction imposed by the laws of physics.
Instead, the spacecraft couldn’t return to Earth until Varda and three government entities—the US military, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, and the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization—all got on the same page. This was far more complicated than anyone envisioned, and Varda had to bypass landing opportunities in July and September because it couldn’t secure governmental approvals.
Finally, earlier this month, the FAA approved a commercial reentry license for Varda’s space capsule, which was somewhat larger than a mini-fridge, to fall back into the atmosphere and parachute to a landing in the remote Utah desert southwest of Salt Lake City. Varda’s landing zone was at the Utah Test and Training Range, a sprawling military facility primarily used for weapons testing.
Varda’s capsule landed in the Utah desert at around 4:40 pm EST (2140 UTC) last Wednesday. Approaching from the north, the craft’s heat shield protected it from scorching temperatures during reentry. Then, the capsule deployed a 6.2-foot-diameter (2.1-meter) parachute to slow its velocity for a relatively gentle landing.
A recovery team went out to retrieve the nearly 200-pound capsule and connect it to a helicopter line for a short flight to a nearby processing facility, where engineers would prepare the spacecraft for transport back to Varda’s headquarters in El Segundo, California.
The mood at Varda following the successful landing was “as cheerful as it gets,” said Delian Asparouhov, who co-founded the company in 2020 with former SpaceX engineer Will Bruey and scientist Daniel Marshall.
“I always felt confidence in our team’s ability to accomplish this,” Asparouhov told Ars. “It was just a question of time.”
Waiting game
Varda achieved several firsts with this mission. The Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) has some experience in supporting spacecraft landings, but this was the first time a commercial spacecraft landed at a military test range, adding another layer of regulatory and bureaucratic oversight. In September, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission deposited a cache of asteroid samples at UTTR.
Varda was the first company to secure a commercial FAA reentry license under streamlined commercial spaceflight regulations known as Part 450. This licensing paradigm is regularly used for commercial launches (there were 117 FAA-licensed launches last year), but this was the first time any company went through this process for a reentry.
Only two companies received commercial FAA reentry licenses before Varda—Lockheed Martin for a single test flight of the Orion spacecraft in 2014 and SpaceX for more than 40 commercial flights of its Dragon crew and cargo spacecraft. Both companies have operated under previous licensing regimes before the FAA introduced the revised Part 450 protocol in 2020.
The FAA’s commercial space office is responsible for licensing commercial launch and reentry operations, with a primary interest in ensuring that these activities don’t endanger the public. But FAA air traffic controllers had to find a time to clear a broad swath of airspace around the trajectory of Varda’s descending space capsule. The FAA’s temporary flight restriction for Varda’s reentry was unusually large, particularly for such a small spacecraft, stretching more than 400 miles (700 kilometers) long and 60 miles (100 kilometers) wide from southern Montana to western Utah.
The timing of Varda’s reentry, along with Varda’s access to the secure military facility, also had to be coordinated with the test range’s busy schedule of military exercises.
Varda launched its mission without an FAA reentry license, but Asparouhov said his company has worked with the FAA since its founding in 2020. To date, spacecraft reentries over the United States have typically been part of a NASA-sponsored human spaceflight program. Varda’s approach is different. If you think of a human-rated spaceship as a luxury automobile, Varda’s spacecraft is more akin to a teenager’s starter car.
“We’re building (something) like a 1986 Toyota Corolla that is meant to be less than a million bucks a pop, quickly refurbished, and then shot right back into space,” Asparouhov said.
If Varda realizes its lofty goals and other companies do the same, the FAA will face the same increase in demand for reentry licenses that it has seen for launch licenses. The FAA’s commercial space office has struggled to keep pace with growth in the launch industry. SpaceX, the company responsible for most of the launches licensed by the FAA, last year called for additional funding to double the FAA’s licensing staff, among other recommendations to overcome regulatory bottlenecks.
Maybe the experience gained from this first mission will help Varda and the FAA better navigate the licensing process next time.
“We wish that it could have been smoother in some ways,” Asparouhov said. “We both went through this process the first time and, as far as it looks, basically nailed the target for the first time (on landing). So I feel really good about the precedent that we’ve set, our ability to do this multiple times this year.”
Eight months in orbit
This was the first in a series of missions Varda plans to build and launch. Varda calls this design the Winnebago series, designed to bring pharmaceutical research specimens back to Earth for laboratory analysis and eventual commercial exploitation. This satellite launched on June 12 on a SpaceX rideshare mission, and less than three weeks later, it completed a pioneering drug manufacturing experiment.
The experimental portion of the spacecraft was contained inside Varda’s reentry pod, which launched on the side of a host satellite built by Rocket Lab. The solar-powered mothership provided electricity, communications, propulsion, and attitude control as the satellite flew in a polar orbit.
For this mission, Varda’s mini-lab grew crystals of ritonavir, a drug commonly used to treat HIV. These types of experiments have typically required support from astronauts and the infrastructure of a large spacecraft like the International Space Station or the space shuttle. Varda’s business plan hinges on producing pharmaceuticals, and perhaps other goods, in low-Earth orbit inside an automated laboratory at a fraction of what it would cost to do it on a human spaceflight mission.
Varda’s founders identified pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and fiber optic manufacturing as the products that could most benefit from in-space manufacturing. There are benefits to producing these goods in the absence of gravity. For example, drug crystals can grow larger and in a more predictable manner in a microgravity environment.
The ritonavir experiment finished its run on June 30, and Varda aimed to recover the spacecraft by late July. That didn’t happen, as Varda had to wait for an FAA reentry license. The next opportunity to land the capsule was in early September, but the FAA and Air Force officials managing the Utah Test and Training Range denied permission for landing. At the time, an Air Force spokesperson told Ars it denied approval for Varda’s landing “due to the overall safety, risk, and impact analysis.”
So Varda’s first Winnebago mission, named W-1, stayed in orbit, flying near its Utah landing site twice per day. This waiting game put a strain on Varda’s team, which, compared to other space companies, is still relatively small at fewer than 100 employees. “All of us were ground down a little bit, especially when we, as a company, put in the right work,” Asparouhov said.
Technically, as last week’s reentry proved, Varda’s spacecraft was capable of safely returning from space.
“This is still the same spacecraft that we designed, built, and launched in June,” he said. “It’s not like we went up there and cranked a couple of wrenches and changed it. Ultimately, what this came down to was interagency coordination with a commercial entity running a first-time procedure.”
With all the approvals finally in hand, engineers got to work preparing for the capsule’s homecoming. The capsule’s Rocket Lab carrier module fired its engine several times to lower its orbit from more than 300 miles (about 500 kilometers), setting up for a final burn Wednesday to put the spacecraft on a pinpoint trajectory toward landing in Utah.
Then the satellite released Varda’s capsule, which had a heat shield to protect it from the heat of reentry. Rocket Lab’s satellite was designed to burn up in the atmosphere. With W-1 back on Earth, Varda will open up the capsule, pull out the ritonavir crystals inside, and deliver them to Improved Pharma, a pharmaceutical company based in Indiana, for evaluation.
Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, Peter Beck, said in a statement that the success of the Varda mission will inform work on developing a reentry capsule for the company’s next-generation Neutron rocket, which could potentially enable human spaceflight missions.
“This mission was a phenomenal feat and impressive display of teamwork between the Rocket Lab and Varda teams to develop a unique and highly capable spacecraft, successfully demonstrate in-space manufacturing, and bring back the capsule and finished pharmaceutical product—all on the first attempt,” Beck said in a statement.
Varda’s big ambitions
“This is the first time in human history that commercial space manufacturing has been done entirely independently of a government piece of infrastructure,” Asparouhov said. “It’s been done at a very lost cost, and this infrastructure has the potential to be at a very high cadence.”
Varda and Rocket Lab are preparing the next Winnebago spacecraft for launch this summer on another SpaceX rideshare mission. The next capsule is “effectively identical” to the spacecraft that just landed, Asparouhov said. Its mission, assuming technical and regulatory factors align, will last a few weeks.
“The biolab inside is a bit more sophisticated,” he continued. “We definitely have a long way to go in terms of biolab sophistication.”
But the next mission will fly payloads for commercial clients rather than a demonstration drug like the one manufactured on Varda’s first spacecraft. A more significant upgrade will debut on a Varda mission in mid-2025. “That’s when we’ll be able to handle a much wider set of molecules and processes,” Asparouhov said.
After the delay in getting approvals for landing this mission, Varda officials signed an agreement with the Australian company Southern Launch. The company operates a remote facility called Koonibba Test Range in South Australia, which could be used for landing future Varda capsules. Varda hasn’t determined whether its second mission will land in Utah or in Australia. In either case, Varda will still need an FAA reentry license because it is a US company, although landing in Australia would allow Varda to avoid scheduling issues at the Utah military range.
The Air Force has an agreement with Varda to evaluate using the company’s reentry capsules, which fly through the upper atmosphere at hypersonic speeds, as a test platform for components and technologies the military use on hypersonic missiles. NASA and Varda are working together on heat shield technology.
Varda has raised $53 million to date from investors and venture capital firms. Asparouhov is a partner at Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, and one of the early backers of Varda. The startup is still small, but Varda has big ambitions.
“Eventually, these automated biolabs will get larger and larger until they become the size of school buses and take up full Falcon 9s or full pallets on Starship,” Asparouhov said.
This is the kind of work commercial space stations in low-Earth orbit could also support. Along with space tourism and a steady diet of government business from NASA, the business cases for these private space stations depend on the market for in-space manufacturing and pharmaceutical research.
There are valid, unanswered questions about whether any of these markets will materialize with enough volume to support commercial space stations by the end of the decade. NASA wants a private outpost built in low-Earth orbit in time to take over for the International Space Station, which is currently set to retire in 2030. Axiom Space, Voyager Space, Blue Origin, Sierra Space, and Vast are all working on commercial space station designs.
If Varda’s grandest visions come true, its automated free-flying laboratories could attract customers who might otherwise do their work on commercial space stations, if they could afford it at all.
Asparouhov sees these commercial space stations as “parallel collaborators” rather than competitors. “One day, when Varda has that school bus-size biolab… we can rely on those types of partners to do maintenance and docking with our automated biolab systems.”
He said the actual work of manufacturing in space is better done on a standalone spacecraft than on an outpost shared with humans.
“These companies still have five to 10 years of development before they really get any significant hardware or cadence underway,” Asparouhov said. “At that point, we’ll be ideally flying once every month, or once every week.”
Listing image by Varda Space Industries/John Kraus