Ultimately as you start to get to a large economy in orbit, you do need extremely low-cost, regularly flown re-entry vehicles, and I think that’s something that’s a core competency of Varda,” Asparouhov said.
A second experimental flight of Varda’s orbital “factory” is scheduled for launch later this year.
Varda Space has raised $53 million to date from investors and venture capital firms. Asparouhov is a partner at Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, and one of the early backers of Varda.
The company was founded to pursue a market for off-planet manufacturing. It’s not the first company geared toward this market, but Varda is different in that it is focusing on flying standalone satellites rather than working on the International Space Station. The company’s founders identified pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and fiber optic manufacturing as the products that could most benefit from in-space manufacturing.
There’s a long waiting list for payloads and experiments to fly to the space station. Perhaps more importantly, there’s a limited capacity to return cargo from the station to Earth, a capability almost exclusively provided by SpaceX resupply missions flying to and from the orbiting research lab about three times per year.
It often takes 12 to 18 months for an experiment to be approved to fly on the space station. Varda aims to cut that time in half, according to Asparouhov.