Varda Space Industries<\/b> successfully landed its second reentry capsule, W-2, and completed the company\u2019s second mission, the company announced on Feb. 28.<\/p>\n
After six weeks in orbit, W-2 touched down at the Koonibba Test Range in South Australia at 6:32 a.m. Pacific Time on Friday morning.<\/p>\n
W-2 carried payloads from multiple partners, including a spectrometer from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and a heatshield developed with NASA\u2019s Ames Research Center. The mission also included Varda\u2019s internal research to expand its pharmaceutical processing capabilities in space.<\/p>\n
The AFRL spectrometer, Optical Sensing of Plasmas in the Reentry Environment (OSPREE), recorded the first optical emission measurements of a spacecraft during atmospheric reentry.. The partnership between AFRL and Varda forms a part of the Prometheus program, which aims to accelerate testing and modernization of hypersonic systems and reentry technologies.<\/p>\n
The W-2 capsule was launched as part of the Transporter-12 rideshare mission with SpaceX on Jan. 14. A Rocket Lab Pioneer satellite bus supported the capsule while it was in-orbit with power, communications, propulsion, and attitude control.<\/p>\n
The recovered capsule will undergo processing with Varda\u2019s payload partners at Southern Launch\u2019s facilities before it is returned to Varda\u2019s Los Angeles headquarters for further analysis. The W-2 capsule is the first reentry at the launch port and the first commercial spacecraft to land on Australian soil.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are ecstatic to have W-2 back on our home planet safely and are proud to support significant reentry research for our government partners as we continue building a thriving foundation for economic expansion to Low Earth Orbit,\u201d Varda CEO, Will Bruey said. <\/p>\n
Previously, Varda\u2019s W-1 capsule was the first commercial spacecraft to land on U.S. soil when it reentered the Utah Test and Training Range in Feb. 2024. The Varda W-1 capsule is currently a nominee for Via Satellite\u2019s<\/i> Technology of the Year Award for 2024. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Varda Space Industries successfully landed its second reentry capsule, W-2, and completed the company\u2019s second mission, the company announced on Feb. 28. After six weeks in orbit, W-2 touched down at the Koonibba Test Range in South Australia at 6:32 a.m. Pacific Time on Friday morning. W-2 carried payloads from multiple partners, including a spectrometer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":49611,"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":[],"class_list":["post-49610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49610"}],"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=49610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49610\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}