![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/vardamcc.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
A look inside Varda\u2019s mission control center.<\/p>\n
Credit:
\n Varda Space Industries<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n
According to TechCrunch, Varda was targeting landing opportunities on September 5 and 7 at the Utah Test and Training Range, a remote facility southwest of Salt Lake City run by the US Air Force. This is the same landing range where NASA\u2019s OSIRIS-REx mission will return samples from an asteroid to Earth on Sunday. The Air Force also denied Varda permission to land, citing the \u201coverall safety, risk, and impact analysis.\u201d Varda and government officials are exploring other recovery options, TechCrunch reported.<\/p>\n
Varda did not provide Ars with a comment for this story, but in a post on the social media platform X last week, the company said its spacecraft is \u201chealthy across all systems.\u201d Varda said its spacecraft is designed for a full year in orbit if needed, but the company will continue to work with its \u201cgovernment partners to bring our capsule back to Earth as soon as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
Untested waters<\/h2>\n
The FAA\u2019s Office of Commercial Space Operations is responsible for licensing commercial launch and reentry operations, but the lion\u2019s share of its work has been reviewing applications for launch licenses. The FAA has licensed 82 commercial launches so far this year, already more than it licensed in all of 2022. Ten years ago, the FAA licensed eight commercial launches.<\/p>\n
The tenfold increase in US commercial launch activity over the last decade has been almost entirely driven by SpaceX\u2019s rising launch cadence. The FAA has requested more funding to hire personnel and keep up with the fast-growing commercial space industry.<\/p>\n
Federal regulators are primarily concerned with the safety of the general public, the risk of damage to property owned by third parties, and environmental threats posed by commercial launch and reentry operations. They also review license applications to ensure the proposed launch or reentry does not jeopardize US national security or foreign policy interests.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s fairly unusual for the FAA to deny outright a commercial launch or reentry license application. An FAA review is currently holding up the second full-scale test flight of SpaceX\u2019s giant new Starship rocket, but federal officials are working closely with SpaceX as the company documents dozens of corrective actions it says have been completed following the first Starship test launch in April. Once the FAA completes its review\u2014likely sometime next month, according to a senior FAA manager\u2014the agency will determine whether to issue SpaceX a modified launch license for the next Starship test flight.<\/p>\n
But reentry licensing is still relatively new. There just aren\u2019t as many reentry vehicles flying, and only two companies have received a commercial FAA reentry license to date.<\/p>\n This chart from an FAA environmental assessment shows the expected trajectory of Varda\u2019s reentry vehicle as it approaches the Utah Test and Training Range.<\/p>\n Credit: Delian Asparouhov, Varda\u2019s co-founder, told Ars in July that Varda and FAA have worked together since the company was established in 2020. He said one part of the discussion between Varda and the FAA was focused on how the company\u2019s plans to regularly return automated space capsules to Earth might impact commercial air traffic.<\/p>\n ,<\/p>\n \u201cUltimately as you start to get to a large economy in orbit, you do need extremely low-cost, regularly flown re-entry vehicles, and I think that\u2019s something that\u2019s a core competency of Varda,\u201d Asparouhov said in July.<\/p>\n Varda announced it completed an experiment on June 30 to grow crystals of ritonavir, a drug commonly used to treat HIV, inside a miniature lab contained within a nearly 3-foot-wide (1-meter) capsule mounted to the side of a satellite flying at an altitude of more than 300 miles (500 kilometers).<\/p>\n With the drug-making experiment finished, the next milestone in the mission was to maneuver the satellite onto a trajectory back into the atmosphere. Then Varda\u2019s capsule would separate from its host spacecraft, supplied by Rocket Lab, which would burn up during reentry. The capsule is protected by a heat shield, with a parachute to slow it down for a relatively soft landing, delivering the pharmaceuticals back to scientists for evaluation.<\/p>\n The mission\u2019s first landing window opened in July, but Varda bypassed that opportunity as it waited for its FAA license.<\/p>\n The spacecraft currently in orbit is the first of Varda\u2019s Winnebago series, and Varda has a contract with Rocket Lab for at least three more Winnebago-class missions, with plans to ramp up to a higher flight rate in the coming years. Varda says the microgravity environment of space offers advantages for producing materials like novel drugs, semiconductors, and fiber optics.<\/p>\n SpaceX\u2019s Dragon and Boeing\u2019s Starliner are the two other commercial reentry vehicles that have flown back to Earth from space. Both are significantly larger and more complex than Varda\u2019s vehicle.<\/p>\n Asparouhov offered the analogy of Dragon and Starliner as similar to luxurious limousines. \u201cWe\u2019re 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A first-of-its-kind commercial spacecraft owned by an in-space manufacturing startup called Varda Space Industries has been in orbit two months longer than originally planned, waiting for government approval to return to Earth with a cache of pharmaceutical specimens. Varda\u2019s satellite launched on June 12 for what was originally supposed to be a monthlong mission to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":45887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[423,387],"class_list":["post-45884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-reentry","tag-varda"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45884"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45884"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45884\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.arstechnica.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/varda_fonsi.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n Federal Aviation Administration<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n