{"id":46114,"date":"2023-07-08T21:27:34","date_gmt":"2023-07-08T13:27:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/in-space-manufacturing-startup-aces-pharma-experiment-in-orbit\/"},"modified":"2023-07-08T21:27:34","modified_gmt":"2023-07-08T13:27:34","slug":"in-space-manufacturing-startup-aces-pharma-experiment-in-orbit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/in-space-manufacturing-startup-aces-pharma-experiment-in-orbit\/","title":{"rendered":"In-space manufacturing startup aces pharma experiment in orbit"},"content":{"rendered":"

The co-founder of California-based startup Varda Space Industries says his company\u2019s first space mission\u2014a miniature lab that has grown crystals of the drug ritonavir in orbit\u2014is on track to end in the coming weeks with a first-of-its-kind re-entry and landing in Utah.<\/p>\n

Varda\u2019s spacecraft launched 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-manufacturing experiment last week. When ground controllers gave the go-ahead, the mini-lab began growing crystals of ritonavir, a drug commonly used to treat HIV.<\/p>\n

The experiment\u2019s 27-hour run was completed on June 30, and data downlinked from the spacecraft showed everything went well.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the first time ever, orbital drug processing happened outside of a government-run space station,\u201d Varda tweeted. \u201cThis is our first step in commercializing microgravity and building an industrial park in LEO (Low Earth Orbit).\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSpace drugs have finished cooking baby!\u201d tweeted Delian Asparouhov, Varda\u2019s co-founder.<\/p>\n

Asparouhov, who established Varda in 2020 with former SpaceX engineer Will Bruey and scientist Daniel Marshall, said Friday he is thrilled with the progress of the demonstration mission.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the critical parts of pharmaceutical processing is being able to maintain appropriate temperature ranges for extended periods of time,\u201d Asparouhov told Ars. \u201cIt was exactly per our expectations, which is really great to see.\u201d<\/p>\n

Varda is planning a sequence of satellite missions. The spacecraft currently in orbit is the first of Varda\u2019s Winnebago series, designed to bring pharmaceutical research specimens back to Earth for laboratory analysis and eventual commercial exploitation.<\/p>\n

The roughly 660-pound (300-kilogram) satellite was built in partnership with Rocket Lab, which supplied a solar-powered carrier module, or bus, providing electricity, communications, propulsion, and attitude control. Varda built a nearly 3-foot-diameter (1-meter) re-entry capsule mounted to the side of Rocket Lab\u2019s satellite platform.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

\n

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This chart from an FAA environmental assessment shows the expected trajectory of Varda\u2019s re-entry vehicle as it approaches the Utah Test and Training Range.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n Federal Aviation Administration<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

Sometime in the next few weeks, Rocket Lab\u2019s ground team will uplink a command to fire the spacecraft\u2019s thrusters for a braking maneuver to drop the satellite out of orbit, setting it on a course to plunge back into the atmosphere and target a landing at the US military\u2019s Utah Test and Training Range southwest of Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n

Varda\u2019s nearly 200-pound re-entry capsule will separate from its carrier craft before re-entry. An ablative carbon-based heat shield material developed by NASA will protect the capsule from scorching hot temperatures as it streaks through the atmosphere, approaching the desert landing zone from the north. Then, if all goes according to plan, the re-entry vehicle will deploy a 6.2-foot-diameter (2.1-meter) main parachute to slow its velocity for a relatively gentle landing.<\/p>\n

FAA license pending<\/h2>\n

Varda is now working with Rocket Lab, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the military to schedule the mission\u2019s return to Earth. The landing window opens July 17, but the actual return date is likely to move to later this month, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow, we\u2019re more in the phase of getting everything lined up between the satellite performing the deorbit burn, as well as the regulatory partners helping with airspace control, all the way down to the military resources that will be helping us with the actual retrieval on the range,\u201d Asparouhov said in an interview.<\/p>\n

Varda and its partners completed a rehearsal for the recovery in Utah in early June, about a week before the mission\u2019s launch.<\/p>\n

One item on Varda\u2019s checklist that hasn\u2019t been completed yet is the FAA\u2019s approval of a commercial re-entry license application. Steven Kulm, an FAA spokesperson, confirmed Friday that the FAA has not yet issued a re-entry license to Varda.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

The FAA ensures commercial launch and re-entry operations don\u2019t 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 only licensed five re-entries this year, all for SpaceX\u2019s Dragon crew and cargo missions returning from the International Space Station.<\/p>\n

Once its license is approved, Varda Space will become just the third company to receive a commercial FAA re-entry license and the first under streamlined commercial spaceflight regulations known as Part 450.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would be the first to operate within this new regulatory regime (for a re-entry),\u201d Asparouhov said.<\/p>\n

The FAA has worked for years to ease the impact of commercial space launches on air traffic over the United States. With launches becoming a regular occurrence at places like Cape Canaveral, Florida, air traffic controllers have reduced the amount of airspace restricted to commercial air traffic around spaceports. That results in fewer flights that have to be re-routed to avoid a launch hazard area.<\/p>\n

Asparouhov said his company has worked with the FAA since its founding in 2020.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs the United States builds this capability to do regular low-cost re-entry over land, how does that interface with commercial air traffic over the United States?\u201d Asparouhov said. \u201cHow does (commercial air traffic) interact with regularly re-entering capsules? We\u2019re really excited to forge that path forward with the FAA.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blazing a new trail back to Earth<\/h2>\n

SpaceX\u2019s Dragon and Boeing\u2019s Starliner are the two other commercial re-entry vehicles that have flown back to Earth from space. Both are significantly larger and more complex than Varda\u2019s vehicle.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a very different type of re-entry capsule. If you think about it, both Dragon and Starliner, these are vehicles that are $100 million-plus, minimum, to build, and billion-dollar-plus total programs. These are meant to carry humans, have active control, fully pressurized environments,\u201d Asparouhov said. \u201cWe are effectively the polar opposite type of re-entry vehicle. If those are luxurious limousines, we\u2019re building 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<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

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Delian Asparouhov, co-founder of Varda Space Industries.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n Founders Fund<\/p>\n<\/figure>\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.<\/p>\n

A second experimental flight of Varda\u2019s orbital \u201cfactory\u201d is scheduled for launch later this year.<\/p>\n

Varda Space 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.<\/p>\n

The company was founded to pursue a market for off-planet manufacturing. It\u2019s not the first company geared toward this market, but Varda is different in that it is focusing on flying standalone satellites rather than working on the International Space Station. The company\u2019s founders identified pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and fiber optic manufacturing as the products that could most benefit from in-space manufacturing.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a long waiting list for payloads and experiments to fly to the space station. Perhaps more importantly, there\u2019s a limited capacity to return cargo from the station to Earth, a capability almost exclusively provided by SpaceX resupply missions flying to and from the orbiting research lab about three times per year.<\/p>\n

It often takes 12 to 18 months for an experiment to be approved to fly on the space station. Varda aims to cut that time in half, according to Asparouhov.<\/p>\n

Varda also won a contract with the US Air Force earlier this year to use its re-entry vehicles as test platforms for materials that could be used on hypersonic missiles and aircraft.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe contract is a great dual-use of our vehicle, which will be focused on the development of small molecule pharmaceuticals,\u201d Varda tweeted earlier this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The co-founder of California-based startup Varda Space Industries says his company\u2019s first space mission\u2014a miniature lab that has grown crystals of the drug ritonavir in orbit\u2014is on track to end in the coming weeks with a first-of-its-kind re-entry and landing in Utah. Varda\u2019s spacecraft launched June 12 as part of a rideshare mission on a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46118,"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":[388,1737,9800,544,387],"class_list":["post-46114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-pharmaceutical","tag-re-entry","tag-ritonavir","tag-rocket-lab","tag-varda"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46114"}],"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=46114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}