Varda Space Industries’ W-1 mission capsule landed in the northern Utah desert on February 21, bringing with it crystals of an antiviral drug that were grown in orbit.
This makes Varda – who have signed a partnership with Southern Launch to conduct future re-entry operations at Koonibba – just the third company to recover an intact spacecraft, after Boeing with Starliner and SpaceX with Dragon.
While other companies have returned space-made products before, they’ve relied on third parties to ferry their precious cargo for them. The W-1 mission though is a fully in house operation, save for launch which hitched a ride on SpaceX’s Transporter-8 rideshare mission back in June last year.
And while the growth was successful a week later, plans to return to Earth were delayed for several months by the FAA and US Military while they worked through their approval processes.