How a former Utahn is behind the space capsule that landed Wednesday in the West Desert
DUGWAY, Utah (ABC4) — A small capsule that was launched into space back in June landed in Utah’s West Desert on Wednesday with a commercial payload for a California company co-founded by a man who grew up in Salt Lake City.
Delian Asparouhov, the co-founder and chairman of Varda Space Industries, grew up in Utah’s capital and attended West High School. At about 2:38 p.m. Wednesday, his company’s W-1 capsule landed at the Utah Test and Training Range, located in the desert about 100 miles west of Salt Lake City.
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“This is the first commercial spacecraft to land over the contiguous United States ever,” Asparouhov told ABC4. “Before this you had the SpaceX Dragon, but that landed in the ocean.”
Last week, Varda got permission from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to land its roughly three-foot-wide, cone-shaped capsule in Utah. The company had planned to return the capsule months ago, but had difficulty securing the commercial re-entry approval.
In order to land the capsule on Wednesday, a large temporary commercial flight restriction was placed over Utah, Idaho and Montana.
“There was lots of coordination that went into this,” Asparouhov said.
The Mission
Varda’s capsule landing was part of a demonstration mission, showing that the company can take pharmaceutical compounds to its laboratory in space and return them.
There’s huge commercial potential with this project, Asparouhov said, because large pharmaceutical companies have already demonstrated the benefits of producing some drugs in microgravity on the International Space Station.
“However, those types of government-run stations are not commercially scalable, profitable or economical,” he said.
What Varda promises is an end-to-end process. They get the drugs to space on a commercial rocket, they operate the biolab facility where the compounds are created, and then they use their own capsule to send the drugs back to earth.
Varda’s next mission is set for this summer, and that will likely re-enter in Australia. Similar to SpaceX, the company plans to work with multiple landing ranges, using them in the future on a case-to-case basis.
Why make drugs in space?
In its demonstration mission, Varda’s capsule carried the drug Ritonavir, an early antiviral HIV medication. In the 90s, the drug was recalled due to a manufacturing issue, which Asparouhov said could be addressed in microgravity.
“Obviously, there have been other solutions to the problem since, but we used it as a perfect demonstration,” he said.
What microgravity offers is a more stable environment to create compounds.
As Asparouhov explained it, think of a candle. On earth, if you put your hand above it, you feel the warm air, and that’s because there’s a gravitational field. The warm air rises because it’s less dense than the cold air around it.
But in space that gravitational field doesn’t exist, and so there’s no hot air currents.
“Ultimately, that’s the benefit,” Asparouhov said. “You basically don’t have those types of conductive currents or pressures, and so you can be much more precise in your chemistry.”
That precision can make drugs more stable and change their performance. For instance, a cancer compound could be produced in space to be administered via a syringe at home, rather than over the course of several hours at a clinic.
Asparouhov summed it up with this sentence: “In space, you can take a molecule and turn it into a medicine.”
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