Space factories for Earth-bound products. Varda Space Industries is building the world's first commercial zero-gravity industrial park at scale. In the near-term, Varda is laser-focused on manufacturing things off Earth that are highly valued on Earth. Over the long-term, Varda can build the infrastructure needed to enable humanity to industrialize space.
Created: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2023-03-21
Company - Varda Space Industries
Product/Service
- Classification
- In-Space Manufacturing
- Category
- In-Space Manufacturing
In-Space Production
Microgravity Flight Service (Reusable Satellite)
Transport Service (Re-Entry)
- Fields
- Space Capsule
Reusable
- Status
- Development
- First launch
- 2023
- The companies did not disclose the terms of the contract. The spacecraft will spend up to three months in orbit to test space manufacturing technologies. At the end of that mission, a reentry capsule will return to Earth the material produced in orbit.
- Company executives said they chose SpaceX because it offered the least expensive and most reliable solution for getting their spacecraft into orbit. “Launch costs is a core driver of our economics,” said Delian Asparouhov, co-founder and president of Varda Space, in an interview. “We want to stick to the lowest cost available solution.”
- There’s also an option for Varda to procure a fourth Photon spacecraft in the future. “For the first few missions, we are developing what we call it as Disposable Space Factories. The Photon and the factory will burn up but the materials will survive. That’s just to keep the technology as simple as possible.”
- The company plans to develop rendezvous and docking capability as soon as the business scales up. “The future is showing that we can send the materials and the factory up to the space for 1 million dollars and we can make a million and one dollars of profit. [T]he moment that happens, we [will] turn around like SpaceX and start producing these factories every single day and make them larger and larger, where initially, rather than having something the size of the Photon, we have something the size of a school bus, and eventually something the size of the ISS, or even ten times the ISS.”
In March 2023, Ashlee Vance wrote in a Bloomberg article:
- Varda plans to use robots to mix, heat and cool chemical compounds suitable for drug development, which will then be converted into a solid form and returned to Earth, where it hopes they’ll serve as the basis for making industrial-size batches of new pharma products in traditional factories. Among the products it is likely to pursue are novel cancer therapies, as well as treatments for diabetes and chronic pain. “We have built a unique way to manipulate chemical systems,” says Will Bruey, Varda’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “And the most expensive chemical systems on Earth are drugs. We knew that making them in space was the killer app of microgravity.”
- It also has a $60 million contract with the US Air Force and NASA to study its capsules’ reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, which they’re expected to do at more than 25 times the speed of sound. So-called hypersonic flight is an area of strategic competition between the US and China, and Varda’s vehicles are attractive for experiments, since unlike many capsules returning to Earth they aren’t carrying humans.
- Numerous promising drugs can crystallize when stored, rendering them unusable on humans. Infamously, this issue forced a stop to the sales of the pill form of the HIV drug Ritonavir in the late 1990s, after years of research and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment. Varda’s executives think the company can use orbital labs to kick-start development of new versions of many older drugs in safe pill and injectable forms.
- Assuming it succeeds in demonstrating in its first launch that its basic methods can work, Varda will still have to confront doubts that many useful drugs can be made in space and questions about whether drugs originating in orbit can be mass-produced in factories on Earth.
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