When Will Broy talks about the future, the timelines are shorter than most people might imagine. The CEO of Varda Space Industries predicts that within 10 years, anyone could stand at a landing site and watch several specialized spacecraft each night streak toward Earth like meteors, each carrying space-manufactured drugs. In 15 to 20 years, he says, it will be cheaper to send a working-class employee into orbit for a month than to keep him on Earth.
The reason Broy believes these scenarios are realistic is because he has seen ambitious business forecasts unfold before, while working as an engineer at SpaceX.
“I remember the first rocket I worked on at SpaceX was the third flight of the Falcon 9.” He said at TechCrunch’s recent Disrupt event. The medium-sized, partially reusable, two-stage launch vehicle has since completed nearly 600 successful missions. “If someone said to me ‘reusable rockets,'”[we’ll see as] a lot [of these] Flights like daily flights from Los Angeles International Airport, I would say, “Okay, [maybe in] 15 to 20 years, and that seems the same level of future.
Varda had already proven the basic concept. In February 2024, after a months-long regulatory journey, the company became the third corporate entity ever to return something from orbit — ritonavir crystals, an HIV drug — joining SpaceX and Boeing in this exclusive club. I’ve completed a few quests since then.
The company returns its pharmaceuticals to Earth inside the W-1 capsule, a small, cone-shaped spacecraft about 90 centimeters wide, 74 centimeters high, and weighing less than 90 kilograms (about the size of a large kitchen trash can). company this week It launched its fifth capsule You’ve never been on a SpaceX ride-sharing mission, which is 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 — such as sedimentation and gravity that pulls on growing crystals — essentially disappear. Varda says this gives him more precise control over the crystallization process, allowing him to form crystals of uniform sizes or even new polymorphs (different structural arrangements of the same molecule). These apparent improvements can translate into real benefits: better stability, greater purity, and longer shelf life of drugs.
The process is not fast. Drug manufacturing can take weeks or months in orbit. But once complete, the capsule separates from the spacecraft bus and reenters Earth’s atmosphere at more than 30,000 kilometers per hour, reaching speeds of more than Mach 25. A heat shield made of carbon material developed by NASA protects the payload inside, and a parachute drops it for a smooth landing.
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The actual work is pretty corny, though, Broy showed. “Forget space for a second,” he said. “We just have this magic oven… where you can create combinations that you couldn’t make otherwise.” Broy added that the mistake people often make about Varda is that the company is “not in the aerospace industry; Space is “just another place to ship to.”
It should be noted that Varda does not discover new drugs or manufacture new molecules. It aims to expand the list of what can be done with existing, approved drugs.
This is not speculative science either. Companies like Bristol-Myers Squibb and Merck have been conducting pharmaceutical crystallization experiments on the International Space Station for years, proving the concept works. Varda says it is only making it commercial by building the infrastructure to do it repeatedly, reliably and at a scale that could be important to the pharmaceutical industry.
As for why now, two things have changed. First, space launches have become bookable and predictable. “Ten years ago, you had to get a charter flight. It was like being flown into orbit if it wasn’t a primary mission payload,” Broy explained. “It’s still expensive today, however [it’s dependable, you can book a slot, and we [have] Launches booked years in advance.”
Second, full-service space companies like Rocket Lab have begun producing satellite buses that can be purchased off-the-shelf. buying A spacecraft from Rocket Lab Integrating drug manufacturing capsules with it is a huge opening.
However, only the highest value products make economic sense. That’s why Varda got into pharmaceuticals; A drug that can cost thousands of dollars per dose can absorb transportation costs.
The “seven domino” theory.
When Broy talks to members of Congress, which he says he does frequently these days, he posits what he calls the “seven domino theory.”
Domino One: Reusable Rockets. finished. Domino II: In-orbit drug manufacturing and return. The third domino is the biggest challenge: getting the drug into clinical trials. “It’s a big deal because what it means is permanent release.”
This is where Varda’s business model is fundamentally different from any other space company.
Think about how satellite companies work. SiriusXM launches satellite radio broadcast. DirecTV launches satellite TV transmission. Even Starlink, with its thousands of satellites, is essentially building a constellation — a network that, once complete, does not require continuous launches to function. These companies treat the launch as a capital investment. They spend money to put the devices into orbit, and then they’re done.
Varda is different. Each drug formulation requires manufacturing processes. Manufacturing processes absolutely require. More demand for drugs means more launches.
This is important because it changes the economics of launch service providers. Instead of selling a fixed number of launches to build a product constellation, they have a customer with (theoretically) unlimited demand that is successfully growing. This type of predictable, scalable demand helps justify the fixed costs of launch infrastructure and lowers prices per launch.
Domino 4 sets off a feedback loop: As Varda’s scope expands, costs fall, making the next level of drugs economically viable. More drugs means more volume, and again lower costs – a cycle that Broy says will “drive launch costs down to the ground.”
Varda’s commercial viability remains unproven, and there are currently no space-manufactured drugs on pharmacy shelves. But the virtuous cycle that Broy envisions will not only benefit Varda. Lower launch costs make space accessible to other industries, including semiconductors, fiber optics, and exotic materials—all that benefit from microgravity but don’t yet justify the expense.
Ultimately, Broy tells his team, launch costs will be so low, it will be cheaper to put an employee in orbit for a month, because creating additional automation will cost more.
“I imagine Jane will go into space for a month. That will be it [heading to] Oil platform. She works in a pharmaceutical factory for a month, then returns home, and… [becomes] The first person ever to go into space and return to where she was born[s] Greater value than the cost of taking her there.”
It’s that moment when “the invisible hand of the free market economy lifts us off our home planet,” Broy says.
Near-death experience
The road to star drug delivery was almost over before it began, Broy told TechCrunch.
Varda W-1 launched in June 2023 aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission. The drug manufacturing process inside the capsule worked as planned, producing crystals of form III ritonavir, a drug-specific crystal structure that is difficult to create on Earth. The experiments were completed within weeks.
But then only the capsule. . . orbit. For six months. Broy said the problem was not technical. Varda was unable to get approval to bring the W-1 capsule home.
The Utah Test and Training Area, where Varda wanted to land, exists “to test weapons and train warriors,” Broy said. Space drugs did not fall into this category, so Farda was not a priority customer. When higher priority military missions needed this range, they clashed with Varda’s scheduled landing windows. Each misstep invalidated the company’s reentry authorization with the FAA, requiring it to start the approval process all over again.
“There were 80 people in the office who spent two and a half years of their lives on this thing, and it’s in orbit, but we’re not sure it can come home,” Broy recalls.
It looked bad from the outside. To observers, it seemed as though Varda had been reckless and launched without proper approvals. But in fact, he said the FAA allowed Varda to launch without a final reentry license because the agency wanted to encourage the nascent commercial reentry industry.
The FAA allowed Varda to launch without a final reentry license, which encouraged the nascent commercial reentry industry.
“They encouraged us to move forward with our launch, with the goal that we would continue to coordinate this license, as well as use re-entry timing with the band, while we were in orbit,” Broy explained.
The real problem was that this was the first attempt to re-enter commercial territory ever. There was no established process for the Utah group to coordinate with the FAA. Both entities felt they took full responsibility.
Varda explored every alternative he could think of. Water drop? The capsule does not float. They will lose it. Australia? Possible, and they started those conversations. But Broy says he made a call: No half measures.
“You either have to go beyond regulation to create that future, or you don’t,” he said. “For Varda to succeed, we need to get down to Earth regularly. So we took it on board and said, ‘Let’s figure this out.’”
While its first mission remained stuck in orbit, the company continued production of the next capsule. And I continued to hire.
In February 2024, eight months after its launch, the W-1 finally returned home. It landed as originally planned at the Utah Test and Training Area, the first commercial spacecraft to land at a military test range and the first to land on U.S. soil under the FAA’s Part 450 authorization framework, which the agency introduced in 2021 to make commercial space operations more flexible.
Varda now has landing sites in both the US and Australia, and is the first company to obtain an FAA Part 450 operator license that allows it to return to the US without resubmitting full safety documentation for each flight.
Meanwhile, Varda has a secondary business that arose out of necessity: hypersonic testing.
There are very few objects that travel through the atmosphere at Mach 25. The environment at these speeds is extreme and unique: temperatures reach thousands of degrees, creating an envelope of plasma around the car. The air itself undergoes chemical reactions as molecules are torn apart and recombined. This environment cannot be replicated on Earth, even in the most advanced wind tunnels.
The Air Force and other defense agencies need to test materials, sensors, navigation systems, and communications equipment in true hypersonic conditions. Traditionally, this requires dedicated test flights that cost upwards of $100 million each and involve significant risks.
Varda offers an alternative. Its W-1 capsules re-entered at Mach 25. The company could include sensors, test new thermal protection materials, or validate equipment in an actual flight environment rather than an approximation. The capsule is like a wind tunnel, and re-entry is the test.
Varda has already conducted aerial experiments for the Air Force Research Laboratory, including an optical emission spectroscopy payload that took in situ measurements of the shock layer during reentry.
The big surprise is that investors are excited about Varda’s story. The company had raised $329 million as of its Series C round last July, most of which was allocated to building out the company’s drug lab in El Segundo. It is also hiring structural biologists and crystallographers to work on more complex molecules, eventually including biological materials such as monoclonal antibodies, which Broy says has a $210 billion market.
There’s going to have to be a lot of work between then and now for Varda to be able to make her way into this business, as well as make an impact in the business she’s currently targeting. But if Broy is right, “then” is closer than most people might imagine now.
