WASHINGTON — Varda Space Industries is preparing to launch its fourth spacecraft, W-4, on a SpaceX rideshare mission scheduled to launch as soon as June 21 from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The Los Angeles-based startup manufactures pharmaceuticals in orbit and returns them to Earth using specialized reentry capsules. These capsules also are used by military customers to test technologies in the extreme conditions of hypersonic flight.
With W-4, Varda is debuting its first spacecraft built entirely in-house, Nicholas Cialdella, Varda’s chief technology officer, told SpaceNews.
The company is consolidating design and production internally, he said, in an effort to shorten the timeline between missions and increase flexibility to tailor vehicles to customer requirements,
Varda decided that vertical integration is necessary for scaling operations, Cialdella said. The company’s first three missions conducted over the past 18 months used spacecraft buses supplied by Rocket Lab.
“We needed to be able to create a platform for a multitude of customers that can fit in our capsule,” he said. “And we really needed that to be something that we could do in-house and quickly, because our major value proposition is high cadence, really increasing the rate at which things reenter.”
Varda’s spacecraft, known as “Winnebago” or W-series, are roughly 120 kg and designed for orbital missions that usually last weeks or months.
The vehicle consists of a satellite bus and a capsule that carries a pharmaceutical processing payload. The satellite bus houses a spacecraft’s essential systems: power, propulsion, communication, and navigation.
Once the mission is complete, the spacecraft deorbits and lands a reentry capsule containing the pharmaceutical product. The capsules are protected with advanced heat shields and re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at speeds exceeding Mach 25, which is more than 25 times the speed of sound — a velocity of approximately 18,000 miles per hour. The capsule deploys parachutes for its final descent to Earth.
The W-4 mission will test out the new bus design and also attempt a manufacturing process known as solution-based crystallization. This technique dissolves a compound in a solvent and controls its environment to form crystals. In microgravity, such crystallization can produce structures that are difficult or impossible to replicate on Earth.
“Getting back data from the crystals helps researchers understand the space environment and how it affects drug manufacturing,” said Cialdella.
Heat shield made in-house
The W-4 capsule is also the first to feature a fully Varda-built heat shield, developed as part of a NASA Tipping Point technology transfer agreement. Through the program, Varda received funding to begin commercial production of C-PICA, short for Conformal Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator — a high-performance thermal protection material originally developed at NASA’s Ames Research Center.
C-PICA is designed to shield reentry vehicles from extreme heat by slowly eroding in a controlled manner during atmospheric reentry. It’s made from a mix of resin and carbon-based felt, and was previously used on all three of Varda’s earlier capsules, with material sourced from NASA.
On W-4, although Varda produced the full heat shield, two shoulder tiles were made by engineers at Ames using the original process. During reentry, Varda and NASA teams will compare the performance of the NASA-made tiles with the rest of the heat shield to evaluate the new commercial production method.
New FAA license
The company’s goal is to eventually launch missions on a monthly cadence, said Cialdella. A key step toward that goal came in May, when the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration approved a five-year reentry license that allows unlimited landings in Australia.
Varda’s W-1 mission completed the first commercial reentry on U.S. soil when it landed in Utah in 2024. The W-2 and W-3 missions landed at the Koonibba Test Range in southern Australia earlier this year, establishing the Australian site as the company’s primary landing location.
The FAA license covers reentries at the site through February 2029.
The license was granted under Part 450, a regulatory framework introduced by the FAA in 2021 to make commercial space operations more flexible. It replaces mission-specific approvals with a performance-based model that allows for multiple flights under a single authorization.
“Under this license, so long as they don’t change that mission profile, they’re good to fly as many of these as they want to fly,” said Kelvin Coleman, FAA associate administrator for commercial space transportation.
Coleman told SpaceNews that Varda is the first company to fully leverage the new licensing process. “They were able to get this multi-mission approval by virtue of providing us high quality inputs and bringing in the necessary expertise focused on licensing.”
Under Part 450 licenses, FAA still monitors operations and requires that companies adhere to safety and risk thresholds, including individual and collective risk assessments. Inspectors are typically present during launch and reentry operations.
Looking ahead
With its own satellite platform and a more efficient licensing process, Varda is expanding its production and testing infrastructure in El Segundo, California, to support faster mission turnaround, Cialdella said.
The company expects growing demand from pharmaceutical firms and defense agencies, as well as organizations that would otherwise rely on the International Space Station to conduct experiments, he said. With the station set to retire as early as 2030 and uncertainty around commercial replacements, Varda is positioning its autonomous platform as a more accessible alternative for microgravity research.
