Varda’s nearly 200-pound re-entry capsule will separate from its carrier craft before re-entry. Sometime in the next few weeks, Rocket Lab’s ground team will uplink a command to fire the spacecraft’s thrusters for a braking maneuver to drop the satellite out of orbit, setting it on a course to plunge back into the atmosphere and target a landing at the US military’s Utah Test and Training Range southwest of Salt Lake City. The spacecraft currently in orbit is the first of Varda’s Winnebago series, designed to bring pharmaceutical research specimens back to Earth for laboratory analysis and eventual commercial exploitation. Varda is planning a sequence of satellite missions. “It was exactly per our expectations, which is really great to see.” “One of the critical parts of pharmaceutical processing is being able to maintain appropriate temperature ranges for extended periods of time,” Asparouhov told Ars. “Space drugs have finished cooking baby!” tweeted Delian Asparouhov, Varda’s co-founder.Īsparouhov, who established Varda in 2020 with former SpaceX engineer Will Bruey and scientist Daniel Marshall, said Friday he is thrilled with the progress of the demonstration mission. “This is our first step in commercializing microgravity and building an industrial park in LEO (Low Earth Orbit).” “For the first time ever, orbital drug processing happened outside of a government-run space station,” Varda tweeted. The experiment’s 27-hour run was completed on June 30, and data downlinked from the spacecraft showed everything went well. When ground controllers gave the go-ahead, the mini-lab began growing crystals of ritonavir, a drug commonly used to treat HIV. Varda’s spacecraft launched June 12 as part of a rideshare mission on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, then completed several weeks of checkouts before starting a 27-hour drug-manufacturing experiment last week. The co-founder of California-based startup Varda Space Industries says his company’s first space mission-a miniature lab that has grown crystals of the drug ritonavir in orbit-is on track to end in the coming weeks with a first-of-its-kind re-entry and landing in Utah.
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