Space manufacturing company Varda gets clearance to launch more uncrewed capsules

Startup has already shown how to make drugs in space

UPDATED America's aviation regulator has issued its first license for unmanned spacecraft to reenter the Earth's atmosphere to Varda, a startup that's trying to build a space-based manufacturing business.

Last April the FAA introduced Part Rule 450 to the Code of Federal Regulations, requiring unmanned vehicles to get a license for return trips. Spacecraft carrying humans have always had such rules.

The award clears Varda to pursue its goal of launching tiny factories into space where they can take advantage of low gravity to build things that can’t be manufactured on Earth.

The space building business, cofounded by former SpaceX engineer Will Bruey and Delian Asparouhov in 2021, has used Rocket Labs hardware to get into orbit. For future trips it will use a range of platforms, including SpaceX. Its next mission is only days away, a Varda spokesperson told The Register, and if all goes well will see its 300kg (660lb) spacecraft spend months in space.

"This milestone was achieved because Varda provided comprehensive means of compliance for flight safety analysis across multiple operations, to which the FAA fully accepted," the agency said in its ruling.

"Provided Varda operates under the authorized mission profile and vehicle design, it will no longer need to apply for mission-by-mission license approvals. The FAA will, however, continue to perform safety oversight of each operation."

Varda already had three missions under its belt before getting the all-clear to carry on firing laboratory equipment into space. The first, which lifted off in June 2023, crystallized a form of the anti-AIDS drug Ritonavir.

"We are focused on our core competencies in the life sciences as far as our internal research goes," Brandi Sippel, Varda's VP of Mission Management, told us. "However, we proudly serve government partners through our hypersonic testbed, and we’re happy to host payloads from researchers in other fields who want to recover their experiments quickly, iterate, and send something up again."

Varda’s second mission carried a payload from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) designed to monitor the effects of high-speed reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. The space company’s craft clocks Mach 25 (19,000 mph) as it de-orbits. Space boffins will use data derived from those dives to design better thermal shielding for hypersonic travel.

The third mission carried Air Force hardware, this time an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) that measured the accuracy of navigation tools at reentry speeds. That's going to be vital in aiming hypersonic machinery operating at high-Mach numbers.

The fourth and fifth missions scheduled for 2025 will be the first on which Vanta builds its own satellite bus, rather than outsourcing it to Rocket Lab. The capsule uses a Conformal Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator, a special form of heat shield developed by NASA that keeps instrumentation and the product of manufacturing in a stable condition during the intense heat of reentry.

"One day we intend to have daily reentries – while we’re launching and reentering quarterly now, we only expect that to increase," Sippel predicted.

NASA's research shows that orbital manufacturing could have real benefits due to lower gravity and the way different materials operate in such environments - for example sediment formation is reduced and thermal stresses differ from here on Earth. ®

UPDATED at 23:00 UTC June 22

To correct errors including the mention of "rockets" in the headline - Varda makes capsules, not rockets - and to change the founding date from 2021 to 2020. Varda's third mission was for the US Air Force, not the Air Force Research Laboratory as previously stated. We also removed a reference to the name "Winnebago" for Varda's capsules. The FAA used it in a report, but Varda told us it names its capsules "W-X", where X is the mission number. We also corrected a reference to Varda building an in-orbit launch platform to the company building its own satellite bus.