When Will Bruey talks about the future, the timelines are shorter than most might imagine. The Varda Space Industries CEO predicts that within 10 years, someone could stand at a landing site and watch multiple specialized spacecraft per night zooming toward Earth like shooting stars, each carrying pharmaceuticals manufactured in space. Within 15 to 20 years, he says, it will be cheaper to send a working-class employee to orbit for a month than to keep them on Earth.
The reason Bruey thinks these scenarios are realistic is because he has watched ambitious business projections unfold before, while working as an engineer at SpaceX.
“I remember the first rocket I worked on at SpaceX was flight three of Falcon 9,” he said at TechCrunch’s recent Disrupt event. The partially reusable, two-stage, medium-lift launch vehicle has since completed nearly 600 successful missions. “If someone had told me ‘reusable rockets,’ and ‘[we’ll see as] many [of these] flights as daily flights out of LAX,’ I would have been like, ‘All right, [maybe in] 15 to 20 years,’ and this feels the same level of futuristic.”
Varda has already proven the core concept. In February 2024, after a months-long regulatory odyssey, the company became only the third corporate entity ever to bring something back from orbit – crystals of ritonavir, an HIV medication – joining SpaceX and Boeing in that exclusive club. It has completed a handful of missions since.
The company brings its pharmaceuticals back to Earth inside the W-1 capsule, a small, conical spacecraft about 90 centimeters across, 74 centimeters high, and weighing less than 90 kilograms (roughly the size of a large kitchen trash can). The company this week launched its fifth capsule ever aboard a SpaceX ride-share mission, hosted by a spacecraft bus that provides power, communications, propulsion, and control while in orbit.
So why manufacture crystals in space? In microgravity, the usual forces that interfere with crystal formation on Earth – like sedimentation and gravity pulling on growing crystals – essentially disappear. Varda says that this gives it much more precise control over crystallization, allowing it to create crystals with uniform sizes or even novel polymorphs (different structural arrangements of the same molecule). These improvements can ostensibly translate into real benefits: better stability, greater purity, and longer shelf life for drugs.
The process isn’t quick. Pharmaceutical manufacturing can take weeks or months in orbit. But once it’s complete, the capsule detaches from the spacecraft bus and plunges back through Earth’s atmosphere at over 30,000 kilometers per hour, reaching speeds above Mach 25. A heat shield made of NASA-developed carbon ablator material protects the cargo inside, and a parachute brings it down for a soft landing.
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The actual business is pretty prosaic, though, Bruey offered. “Forget about space for a second,” he said. “We just have this magic oven . . . where you can create formulations that you otherwise couldn’t.” Added Bruey of what people often get wrong about Varda, the company isn’t “in the space industry; we’re in-space industry,” he said. Space is “just another place to ship to.”
Worth noting: Varda isn’t discovering new drugs or creating new molecules. It’s aiming to expand the menu of what can be done with existing, approved drugs.
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