W-2 touched down just a shave after one am local time after spending 45 days in orbit. The capsule carried a spectrometer built by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory and employed a heatshield developed in collaboration with NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. The capsule also carried Varda’s expanded pharmaceutical reactor which enables the production of life-saving medicine in space.
Recovery operations were led by Southern Launch with Varda payload experts and representatives from the Far West Coast Aboriginal Corporation – the traditional owners of the land on which the capsule landed. The recovered capsule will undergo processing with Varda’s payload partners at Southern Launch’s specialist facilities before its returned to the Varda headquarters in Los Angeles for further analysis.
For Australia, this mission ushers in a new era of space capabilities for the nation. The W-2 mission was the first time a commercial space craft re-entry was granted under Australian legislation and is just the first of many scheduled to return to the Koonibba Test Range.
Southern Launch CEO Lloyd Damp noted that the mission marks an incredible step forward for Australia as the global landing site for re-entries with the Koonibba Test Range fully instrumented with telemetry, radars and ground and airborne optical and spectral image capture capabilities.
