When Will Bluey talks about the future, the timeline is shorter than many imagine. Varda Space Industries’ CEO predicts that within 10 years someone will be able to stand at the landing site and watch multiple purpose-built spacecraft swoop towards Earth like shooting stars every night, each carrying medicines made in space. In 15 to 20 years, he says, it will be cheaper to send working-class people into orbit for a month than to keep them on Earth.
Bluey believes these scenarios are realistic because he previously saw ambitious business predictions play out when he worked as an engineer at SpaceX.
“I remember the first rocket I worked on at SpaceX was Falcon 9 No. 3,” 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 could tell me ‘reusable rockets'”[we’ll see as] many [of these] Like a daily flight out of LAX,” and I would have thought, “Okay. [maybe in] I feel the same level of future as “15 to 20 years from now.” ”
Varda has already proven the core concept. In February 2024, after months of regulatory struggles, the company became the third corporate entity in history to bring something back from orbit (crystals of the HIV drug ritonavir), joining SpaceX and Boeing in that exclusive club. I have completed several missions since then.
The company will bring its medicines back to Earth in the W-1 capsule, a small conical spacecraft about 90 centimeters in diameter, 74 centimeters tall and weighing less than 90 kilograms (about the size of a large kitchen trash can). The company will launch these capsules on an ad hoc basis on SpaceX rideshare missions and host them in orbit with a Rocket Lab spacecraft bus that provides power, communications, propulsion, and control.
So why manufacture crystals in space? In microgravity, the normal forces that prevent crystal formation on Earth, such as sedimentation and gravity pulling on growing crystals, essentially disappear. Varda says this allows for more precise control of crystallization, allowing the creation of uniformly sized crystals or even new polymorphs (different structural arrangements of the same molecule). These improvements can lead to real-world benefits, such as increased drug stability, increased purity, and extended shelf life.
The process is not fast. Manufacturing drugs can take anywhere from weeks to months in orbit. Once completed, however, the capsule will separate from the spacecraft bus and enter Earth’s atmosphere at speeds of more than 30,000 kilometers per hour, reaching speeds of more than Mach 25. A heat shield made of carbon ablator material developed by NASA protects the cargo inside and allows for a soft landing with a parachute.
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Bluey says people often misunderstand Varda. The company is “not in the space industry. We are in the space industry,” he said. Space is “just another destination.”
In other words, the actual business is very mundane, he suggested, suggesting that people imagine a bioreactor, or just an oven, with the usual knobs for temperature, stirring speed, pressure, etc., and Varda adding “gravity knobs.”
“Forget about space for a second,” Bluey said. “At the back of our warehouse we have a magical oven that allows us to create formulations that would be impossible otherwise.”
It’s worth noting: Varda isn’t discovering new drugs or creating new molecules. The aim is to expand the menu of things that can be done with existing approved drugs.
This is not speculative science. Companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb and Merck & Co. have been conducting drug crystallization experiments on the International Space Station for years to prove the concept works. Varda says they’re just commercializing it by building the infrastructure to do it repeatedly and reliably at a scale that could actually matter to the pharmaceutical industry.
As for why it happened now, two things have changed. First, space launches are now bookable and predictable. “Ten years ago, you had to take a charter flight. If you weren’t the payload of a primary mission, getting to orbit was like hitchhiking,” Bluey explained. “It’s still expensive, but [it’s dependable, you can book a slot, and we [have] The launch had been booked years in advance. ”
Second, companies like Rocket Lab have begun producing off-the-shelf satellite buses. Purchasing the Photon bus from Rocket Lab and integrating the company’s drug manufacturing capsules unlocked a major unlock.
Still, only the highest value products make economic sense. That’s why Varda started with pharmaceuticals. For drugs that cost thousands of dollars per dose, transportation costs can be absorbed.
“Seven Dominos” Theory
When Mr. Bluey speaks frequently to members of Congress these days, he touts what he calls the “seven domino theory.”
Domino One: A reusable rocket. end. Domino 2: Manufacture and return drugs in orbit. Domino 3 is the big issue of moving drugs into clinical trials. “This is a big deal because it means a permanent launch.”
This is where Varda’s business model is fundamentally different from all other space companies.
Consider how a satellite company works. SiriusXM launches satellites to broadcast radio. DirecTV launches satellites to transmit television. Even Starlink, which has thousands of satellites, is essentially building a constellation, a network that, once completed, doesn’t require continuous launches to function. These companies treat startups as capital investments. They spend money to put hardware into orbit and that’s it.
Varda is different. Each drug formulation requires a manufacturing process. Booting is required for manufacturing to run. As the demand for pharmaceuticals increases, more new drugs will be released.
This is important because it changes the economics for launch providers. Rather than selling a fixed number of launches to build a constellation, you have customers with (theoretically) unlimited demand that grows with success. Such predictable and scalable demand helps justify the fixed costs of launch infrastructure and lowers the price per launch.
Domino 4 creates a feedback loop. As Varda scales up, costs will come down and the next stage of medicines will become economically viable. More drugs means more scale, again reducing costs. According to Bluey, this cycle “significantly drives up launch costs.”
Varda’s commercial viability remains unproven, and there are currently no space-manufactured drugs on pharmacy shelves. But the virtuous cycle Breuy envisions will not only benefit Varda. Lower launch costs will make space accessible to all sectors that would benefit from microgravity but cannot yet justify the cost, including semiconductors, fiber optics, and exotic materials.
Ultimately, Bluey told the team that the launch costs would be so low that it would be cheaper to keep an employee in orbit for a month, since creating additional automation would be expensive.
“I imagine ‘Jane’ going into space for a month. It would look something like this.” [heading to] Oil rig. She works in a pharmaceutical factory for a month and returns. [becomes] The first person in history to go into space and return to the place he created[s] It’s worth more than the cost of taking her there. ”
Brewie says this is the moment when “the invisible hand of free market economics is pulling us away from our home planet.”
near death experience
Bluey told TechCrunch that the meteoric road to drug delivery was almost over before it even began.
Varda launched W-1 on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rideshare mission in June 2023. The drug manufacturing process inside the capsule worked as planned, producing crystals of Form III ritonavir, a specific crystal structure of the HIV drug that is difficult to create on Earth. The experiment was completed within a few weeks.
But after that it’s just capsules. . . It stayed in orbit. For 6 months. Bluey said the problem was not technical. Varda was unable to obtain permission to bring the W-1 capsule home.
The Utah Test and Training Range, where Varda had hoped to land, exists to, as Bluey said, “test weapons and train warriors.” Space drugs didn’t fit into that category, so Varda wasn’t a priority customer. Varda’s scheduled landing slot was exceeded when higher-priority military missions required range. After each collision, the company had to revoke its re-entry permit with the FAA and restart the approval process.
“We’ve got 80 people in the office and we’ve spent two and a half years of our lives working on this. We’re in orbit, but we don’t know if we’ll ever come back,” Bluey recalled.
From the outside, the situation looked bad. To observers, Varda appeared reckless and started without proper approval. But in fact, he said, the FAA wanted to encourage early commercial re-entry into the industry and had allowed Varda to launch without a final re-entry permit.
The FAA allowed Varda to launch without a final reentry permit, encouraging the nascent commercial reentry industry.
“They encouraged us to proceed with the launch, and the goal is to continue to adjust the use of reentry timing according to that license and range while we are in orbit,” Bluey explained.
The real problem was that this was the first attempt at commercial re-entry. There was no established process for Utah’s range to coordinate with the FAA. Both companies felt like they were responsible for everything.
Varda considered every possible alternative. Landing on water? The capsule will not float. they’re going to lose it. Australia? They started a conversation saying it was possible. However, Bluey said he made the call saying he could not take half-hearted measures.
“Either we have to push the regulatory boundaries to create this future, or we don’t,” he said. “For Varda to be successful, it needs to land on land regularly. So we just got hooked and said, ‘Let’s think about this.'”
While the first mission remained stuck in orbit, the company continued to produce the next capsule. We continued to hire.
In February 2024, eight months after its launch, W-1 finally returned. As originally planned, the aircraft landed at the Utah Test and Training Range. It was the first commercial spacecraft to land at a military test range under the FAA’s Part 450 licensing framework, which the FAA introduced in 2021 to make commercial space operations more flexible, and the first to land on U.S. soil.
Varda now has landing sites in both the United States and Australia and has become the first company to receive an FAA Part 450 operator license that allows it to re-enter the United States without resubmitting full safety documentation for each flight.
Meanwhile, Varda has a side business called hypersonic testing that was born out of necessity.
Very few objects travel through the atmosphere at Mach 25. The environment at this speed is extreme and unique. Temperatures reach thousands of degrees and a sheath of plasma forms around the vehicle. Air itself undergoes chemical reactions as molecules are torn apart and recombined. This environment cannot be recreated on Earth, even in a state-of-the-art wind tunnel.
The Air Force and other defense agencies must test materials, sensors, navigation systems, and communications equipment under real-world hypersonic conditions. Traditionally, this required dedicated test flights, each costing more than $100 million and carrying significant risks.
Varda suggests an alternative. The company’s W-1 capsule has already re-entered at Mach 25. The company can embed sensors, test new thermal protection materials, and validate equipment in real flight environments rather than approximations. The capsule is like a wind tunnel, and re-entry is the test.
Varda is already flying experiments for the Air Force Research Laboratory, including an optical emission spectroscopy payload that makes in-situ measurements of the shock layer during atmospheric reentry.
Investors are excited about Varda’s story as a big surprise. As of July’s Series C round, the company had raised $329 million, most of which went toward building its pharmaceutical research lab in El Segundo. It also employs structural biologists and crystallization scientists to work on more complex molecules, including eventually biologics such as monoclonal antibodies, a market that Bluey says is $210 billion.
A lot has to happen between then and now for Varda to get into that business and hurt the business she’s now targeting. But if Bluey is right, that moment is closer than many people currently imagine.
