I’m writing this flying from LA to SF where I just filmed with Delian Asparouhov and Will Bruey at their Varda HQ in El Segundo, CA. Varda is a new company, only 2.5 years old, but they have a spacecraft on orbit that will soon come screaming back down to earth at 25x the speed of sound and land in the Utah desert, which looks quite similar to the Grapevine I’m currently flying over.

What’s in said spacecraft? Drugs. Technically, space drugs, because they’re made in space.

“Imagine if you didn’t have a temperature control on a bioreactor, how limiting would that be to the discovery, creation, and formulation of drugs?” Delian asked me in our prewriting call for filming.

I’m pretty sure you could hear the click in my brain over the Zoom call, it not you could at least see my “oohhh” face.

We’re doing this new thing with S³ where we don’t explain things beyond the startup’s core mission, so we create clips of the founders explaining these things and integrate them into the episode with links/in-thread! An “episode” now is no longer singular but comes with some fun clips as well 😎 

Right now we’re stuck with no “gravity off switch.” Gravity is one of the four fundamental forces of physics, and previously we have had no way to alter it in complex manufacturing. This idea is not new, scientists have experimented with microgravity formulation and showed that crystalline structures formed differently in microgravity.

So, Varda has decided to create, commercialize, and rapidly scale humanity’s ability synthesize space drugs.

Beyond microgravity, as if in this context it’s no longer a big deal, space is devoid of natural convection and sedimentation which may also produce more organized crystals. These newly formulated space drugs may potentially lead to improved bioavailability, longer shelf-life, and enhanced methods of administration.

Beyond drugs, Varda may fundamentally change launch cadence forever

While filming with Varda, we were taking a break as someone spilled coffee on their shirt and was finding another, they ended up taking the one they gave to me for merch — if I had beehiiv premium I’d put a poll here for you to guess whether it was Delian or Will. Anyways, while waiting, this wonderful and highly complex graphic popped up on my timeline.

Thank you Rare North American Space Koala for this incredible graphic and currently accurate take on rapidly reusable rockets. It is truly insane that in a span of less than ~4 years SpaceX has put up as many LEO Starlink satellites as it has… But, what if I told you this was small potatoes?

This sort of blew my brain a bit, coming from the telco satellite world. I work at Astranis, where launching satellites at the rate we soon will be seems like a big driver for launch necessity. However, it’s actually not as big as a manufacturing driver might be.

Asteroid mining and water extraction from the moon aren’t ready yet. However, accessing microgravity for advanced, and highly expensive, manufacturing would have an everlasting demand for product, and therein launch necessity.

If Varda’s hypothesis and ability to execute are both true, all of a sudden, pharmaceutical companies and humanity at large, will desperately want/need space drugs — as many as we can get and as quickly as possible. Let’s say the next big disease curing, cancer halting, ailment ending cure is found to be a rare synthesis only possible in microgravity? We’ll want as much of the stuff as we can get.

All of a sudden there’s a massive demand, a lot of $$$ for Varda to go and make it, and a big need for insanely rapid, reusable rockets. Varda’s vision for in space manufacturing is more similar to Amazon’s delivery cadence versus ordering a new Ford truck and waiting months to years for it, a closer representation of what launching things to space is like right now.

“Our current goal is to go camping near our launch sight in Utah and see multiply shooting stars [Varda reentry vehicles coming back to earth].” Will excitedly shared in our prewriting call.

My initial reaction to that was that of a filmmaker, in my mind it looked like a scene out of a Sci-Fi universe/series I’ve been writing for almost 5 years.

Normal people, camping, lit up for a moment by spacecraft beautifully reentering the atmosphere to provide otherwise impossible medical therapies.

Reread that, that is wild. It’s also not a thing happening in the future, it’s happening now — Varda’s first vehicle is still in orbit waiting for the FAA to approve reentry. We are living in the future, my Sci-Fi series is no longer fiction.

Varda’s speed is scary

What’s equally exciting about Varda, beyond brand new drug delivery and novel discoveries, is the fact they’ve put a bioreactor in space in 2.5 years with $150m in funding raised.

Caution, opinion ahead that could be totally incorrect: I would guess Varda’s success in raising so much, so early, is an attribute of Delian and his reputation in the VC world (he’s a partner at the famed Founder’s Fund and an alum of Khosla Ventures) while the speed of getting a spacecraft in orbit is a result of Will’s focus and determination to “get hardware off the ground as quickly as possible.”

Will’s a world class spacecraft systems director and Delian is a phenomenal visionary and to Will’s occasional dismay, Tweeter:

Delian and Will are a powerful duo, they’re energy and ability to work together even comes across in the episode where you hear them discussing a relatively ambitious flight Delian was hoping to make later that day. You can get a sense of it from this clip of them touring me through their factory:

There’s much work to do

Coming off the back of filming an episode of S³ about how important formulation is, it seems obvious to me that the ability to utilize an entirely inaccessible fundamental force of physics would bring pharmaceutical companies on Varda’s El Segundo HQ like a swarm of zombies. However, Will and Delian explained that a huge part of their sales cycle is education. Coming from Founder’s Fund and SpaceX, the idea is obvious to both Will an Delian, but less obvious to the pharmaceutical world they explained to me.

Delian and Will’s ambitions for Varda extend beyond pharmaceuticals, they envision a future where humanity has an “on orbit manufacturing park the size of Chicago,” and what’s crazy is that that statement is in fact not crazy.

We are months, if not weeks, away from SpaceX’s Starship’s 2nd orbital attempt all the while they launch over fifty Falcon 9 missions a year — China, US, and Russia have begun a second space race which is likely to leave the US with a permanent base on the moon, much akin to a constant human presence onboard the ISS since November 2000 (basically since I was born, humanity has been a space species since I was born).

Delian and Will’s ambitions are tempered by a humility and understanding of the great challenges that lie ahead, as seen in this tweet Delian posted today:

Per aspera ad astra, Varda — I can’t wait to go camping and see the glow of life saving fireworks reenter our atmosphere.

Keep on building the future,

— Jason