The production startup in space experiments with the Ars Technica pharmaceutical experiment in orbit

The co-founder of California startup Varda Space Industries says his company’s first space mission, a miniature laboratory that grew crystals of the drug ritonavir in orbit, is on track to wrap up in the coming weeks with an early return to space. its kind. and landing in Utah.

The Vardas spacecraft launched on June 12 as part of a rideshare mission on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, then completed several weeks of checkouts before starting a 27-hour drug-producing experiment last week. When ground controllers gave the green light, the mini-lab began growing crystals of ritonavir, a drug commonly used to treat HIV.

The 27-hour run of the experiment was completed on June 30, and data transmitted from the spacecraft showed that all went well.

For the first time ever, orbital drug processing took place outside a government-run space station, Varda tweeted. This is our first step in commercializing microgravity and building an industrial park in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

The space drugs are done cooking, baby! tweeted Delian Asparouhovco-founder of Vardas.

Asparouhov, who founded Varda in 2020 with former SpaceX engineer Will Bruey and scientist Daniel Marshall, said Friday he was excited about the progress of the demonstration mission.

One of the critical parts of pharmaceutical processing is being able to maintain proper temperature ranges for long periods of time, Asparouhov told Ars. It was exactly to our expectations which is really nice to see.

Varda is planning a sequence of satellite missions. The spacecraft currently in orbit is the first of the Vardas Winnebago series, designed to bring pharmaceutical research samples back to Earth for laboratory analysis and eventual commercial exploitation.

The approximately 660-pound (300-kilogram) satellite was built in collaboration with Rocket Lab, which provided a solar-powered carrier module, or bus, that provides electricity, communications, propulsion and attitude control. Varda built a nearly 1-meter-diameter reentry pod mounted on the side of Rocket Labs’ satellite platform.

In the coming weeks, the Rocket Labs ground team will issue a command to activate the spacecraft’s thrusters for a braking maneuver to deorbit the satellite, setting it on a course to return to the atmosphere and aim for a landing near United States Military Utah Test and Training Range southwest of Salt Lake City.

Varda’s nearly 200-pound reentry capsule will separate from its carrier vessel before reentry. A carbon-based ablative heat shield material developed by NASA will protect the capsule from scorching temperatures as it passes through the atmosphere, approaching the desert landing zone from the north. Then, if all goes to plan, the reentry vehicle will deploy a 1.2-meter-diameter main parachute to slow its speed for a relatively soft landing.

FAA license pending

Varda is now working with Rocket Lab, the Federal Aviation Administration and the military to schedule the return missions to Earth. The landing window opens on July 17, but the actual return date is likely to move to later this month, he said.

Now, we’re more in the stage of aligning everything from the satellite performing deorbit, as well as the regulatory partners that help with airspace control, down to the military assets that will help us with the actual recovery on the range. Asparouhov said in an interview.

Varda and her partners completed a recovery run in Utah in early June, about a week before the missions launched.

One item on Varda’s checklist that has not yet been completed is the FAA’s approval of a commercial re-entry license application. Steven Kulm, an FAA spokesman, confirmed on Friday that the FAA has not yet issued a re-entry license to Varda.

The FAA ensures that commercial launch and reentry operations do not endanger the public. The FAA has licensed 53 commercial launches so far in 2023 for SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Virgin Galactic, Virgin Orbit, Relativity Space and ABL Space Systems. But it has licensed just five reentries this year, all for SpaceX’s Dragon crew and cargo return missions from the International Space Station.

Once its license is approved, Varda Space will become only the third company to receive an FAA commercial license for re-entry and the first subject to simplified regulations for commercial spaceflight known as Part 450.

We would be the first to operate within this new regulatory regime (for a return), Asparouhov said.

The FAA has worked for years to alleviate the impact of commercial space launches on air traffic in the United States. With launches becoming a regular occurrence in places like Cape Canaveral, Florida, air traffic controllers have reduced the amount of airspace restricted to commercial air traffic around spaceports. This results in fewer flights having to be redirected to avoid a launch hazard area.

Asparouhov said his company has partnered with the FAA since its founding in 2020.

As the United States builds this capability to perform regular low-cost land reentries, how does it interface with commercial air traffic over the United States? said Asparouhov. How does it (commercial air traffic) interact with regularly returning capsules? We are very excited to forge that path with the FAA.

Open a new trail to get back to Earth

SpaceX’s Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner are the other two commercial reentry vehicles that have returned to Earth from space. Both are significantly larger and more complex than Varda’s vehicle.

It’s a very different kind of reentry pod. If you think about it, both Dragon and Starliner, these are vehicles that cost at least $100 million, minimum, to build and total programs over billions of dollars. These are meant to carry humans, have active controlled, fully pressurized environments, Asparouhov said. We are effectively the polar opposite type of reentry vehicle. If those are luxury limousines, they were building like the 1986 Toyota Corolla that should cost less than a million dollars a pop, quickly refurbished and then launched into space.

Ultimately, as you start to achieve a large economy in orbit, you need low-cost, regularly flown reentry vehicles, and I think that’s something that is a core competency of Varda, Asparouhov said.

A second experimental flight from the Vardas Orbital Factory is scheduled for launch later this year.

Varda Space has raised $53 million from investors and venture capital firms so far. Asparouhov is a partner at Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm founded by billionaire Peter Thiel and an early supporter of Varda.

The company was founded to pursue a market for off-planet manufacturing. It’s not the first company geared towards this market, but Varda is different in that it’s focusing on flying autonomous satellites rather than working on the International Space Station. The company’s founders identified pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and fiber optic manufacturing as the products likely to benefit most from manufacturing in the space.

There is a long waiting list for payloads and experiments to fly to the space station. Perhaps more importantly, there’s a limited ability to return cargo from the station to Earth, a capability provided almost exclusively by SpaceX’s resupply missions that fly to and from the orbiting research lab about three times a year.

It often takes 12 to 18 months for an experiment to be approved to fly to the space station. Varda aims to cut that time in half, according to Asparouhov.