After a month in space, Varda plans to bring that first factory back down to Earth, where it’ll safely land at the Department of Defense’s Utah Test and Training Range, providing valuable insight into the future of making things in space. From here, Varda and other companies hope to put other space factories into orbit to work towards creating other drugs in space, as well as different items like fiber optic cable.
The goal is to utilize the first space factories to see how we can maximize the stability and production of different things by removing the force of gravity from the situation.
Of course, we’ll still need to see how those items react when they are transported back down to Earth, but if we can find more stable ways to create some of the most needed drugs, that’s a huge win for medical research all around.