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.