Varda Space Industries is a winner of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair for successfully launching a first-of-its-kind in-orbit manufacturing spacecraft and returning it to Earth, bringing home a batch of space-made drugs that could revolutionize the industry. The question Is space the new frontier when it comes to manufacturing pharmaceuticals and other materials? The results The California startup became the first company to land a spacecraft on U.S. soil. Early last year, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) granted Varda a Part 450 reentry license, which falls under new regulations. Since then, the company has wasted no time in launching its space factories to orbit, using its 264-pound (120-kilogram) capsules to crystallize drugs in microgravity and return them to Earth. Varda has launched and landed three missions thus far, with the fourth capsule currently in orbit and a fifth one planned before the end of this year. Varda launched its first capsule, W-Series 1, in June 2023 on board SpaceX’s Transporter 8 rideshare mission. The company used the capsule to grow ritonavir—a drug used to treat HIV—while it was mounted to Rocket Lab’s Photon spacecraft in microgravity. Although the mission was a success, Varda faced a major hurdle in returning its capsule back to Earth. “We didn’t have a reentry license at the time,” Delian Asparouhov, president and co-founder of Varda, told Gizmodo. The U.S. Air Force denied Varda’s request to land its capsule at a Utah training area, and the FAA withheld reentry approval, leaving the capsule stranded in space for months. “Being up in orbit every day is a terrifying outcome where on any one day there’s limited risk of the vehicle going haywire, but over the course of eight months, you’re just adding up a bunch of risks. A component could fail, a micrometeorite could hit [the capsule],” Asparouhov added. “And we couldn’t really make more engineering progress, because what’s the point of getting a second, third, and fourth vehicle ready to fly when the first one is basically stuck up there?” Varda had originally intended for its capsule to spend one month in orbit to complete its in-space manufacturing experiment, but the mission was extended as the company navigated through regulatory obstacles. The capsule finally reentered Earth’s atmosphere and landed in the U.S. Air Force’s Utah Test and Training Range on February 21, 2024. The capsule’s return marked the first retrieval of an intact spacecraft, with its space-produced crystals inside, by a commercial company. “Anytime that you’re the first at something, and the first at something that is also a very well-known regulated industry, i.e., aerospace, because there are dangers involved in it, it’s always going to be tricky,” Eric Lasker, Varda’s chief revenue officer and a member of the founding team, told Gizmodo. “Until you actually have a company that’s trying to go through the path that you lay out, you almost don’t really know where the quirks are because you learn a lot by going through that first process.” With the capsule finally back on Earth, Varda was officially able to declare the mission a success. “We picked up our capsule, we opened it up, all the experiments worked, and they worked flawlessly,” Lasker said. “You spent almost every waking hour in some capacity thinking about this thing, from the founding of the company to it orbiting and then, in some odd bureaucratic way, getting stuck in orbit for a little bit of time, to seeing it on the ground. It kind of felt unbelievable.” Following the success of the first mission, Varda launched three more capsules to low Earth orbit to continue its in-space pharmaceuticals processing experiments. Why they did it Asparouhov has been following the industrialization of space since middle school. At the time, a few space startups, like Moon Express, were beginning to take shape, but access to orbit was still fairly restrictive. Fast forward to 2019, when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster achieved a record-breaking streak by launching and landing four times in a row. That’s when Asparouhov knew it was time to pull the trigger on his idea. “It was clearly no longer just a fluke, but a pattern,” Asparouhov said. “Access to space is going to get so much easier, and so there’s clearly going to be an application layer built on top of that new infrastructure.” Varda was established on the belief that there were opportunities in the aerospace industry beyond rocket launches, a field that SpaceX had already dominated. Instead, the company sought to not only go to space but also bring something back with it. Prior to Varda’s attempts, research had been conducted on manufacturing various materials in the microgravity environment on board the International Space Station (ISS), which eliminates gravity’s influence on buoyancy and convection. “Let’s say you have a lava lamp; it blobs up and blobs down, or if you float pepper in some water, it goes down and starts bumping into each other,” Lasker said. “You just don’t have that in microgravity, so at a molecular level, if you have a couple of molecules that are drifting down due to the force of gravity, they are going to crystallize in a different way than if they are just sitting in microgravity.” For the pharmaceutical industry, the microgravity environment has been shown to produce larger and more perfect protein crystals, like the ones manufactured by Varda’s W-1 mission, than those created on Earth, according to NASA. Manufacturing drug crystals in space for mass production on Earth has the potential to create more effective, concentrated doses of medicine. “You would never take a drug just because it’s made in space, but because it works better,” Lasker said. Why they’re a winner Despite a rocky start, Varda has proven itself as an innovative, groundbreaking company capable of launching and bringing back one capsule after another. “When we launched that first mission, we were 40 or 50 people, but now we’re 140 people,” Asparouhov said of Varda’s growth over the past year. “We now have nonstop vehicles rolling off the U.S. production line.” “It’s been really exciting to see a transition from what was originally a hypothetical, sort of crazy, one-off mission to now—it feels like it’s something that is a consistent operation,” he added. Varda was also the first company to acquire a spacecraft reentry license, opening up a new realm for startups in the aerospace industry. “The idea that orbital manufacturing is something that can exist in the supply chain, and it’s not just this novel piece of experimentation.” Lasker said. “Varda is certainly one piece of it, our infrastructure is clearly working, but this is an entire field.” “It’s truly bigger than Varda,” he added. “This orbital manufacturing industry has been something that a lot of folks have thought about, going back to the early days of the space industry, and I think we’re hopefully fortunate enough to be the ones to kind of tip it over the edge.” What’s next As Varda’s fourth capsule sits in orbit, the company is already planning to launch mission number five before the end of the year. This fast-paced launch schedule is only expected to get busier as production scales upward. “We always knew that for this company to be successful, we need to do this a lot,” Lasker said, pointing out that the capsules for missions five, six, and seven are already sitting behind him on the factory floor awaiting launch. By next year, Varda is planning to launch two spacecraft on the same mission and operate them both at the same time. “The year after that, we’ll have our first mission that’s three at a time, and then continue to scale up from there,” Asparouhov said. “At some point, you might see a full Falcon 9 with just Varda basically all over it.” As far as how soon regular consumers can get their hands on space drugs, Asparouhov predicts that the first clinical trials may take place closer to the end of the decade. “So, still a long path ahead of us, but it’s exciting to see this transition from what were previously purely academic papers to something that we think has a clear path to commercialization,” he added. Lasker agrees. “It’ll take some time before you and I are sitting at home and we’ve got a box of something that was made in space, but the path is very clear in front of us to get there.” The team This is a company-wide project, but key contributors included Delian Asparouhov, president and co-founder; Will Bruey, CEO and co-founder; Adrian Radocea, chief science officer; Chithra Perumal, CFO; Jon Barr, COO; and Eric Lasker, chief revenue officer. Click here to see all of the winners of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair.