The Space-Based Drug Factory That Can’t Come Home - IEEE Spectrum

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IEEE websites place cookies on your device to give you the best user experience. By using our websites, you agree to the placement of these cookies. To learn more, read our Privacy Policy. Orbiting lab pioneers space-made medicines—and the red tape needed to land Varda Space Industries’ Winnebago 1 satellite now orbits, awaiting the go-ahead to return to earth. Five hundred kilometers above the Earth, a small spacecraft is waiting patiently for permission to return home. The autonomous return capsule, made by startup Varda Space Industries, of Torrance, CA, was meant to have landed in the remote Utah desert early in September. It would have been the first commercial space company to return a drug made in space to Earth, in this case a few grams of the HIV and hepatitis C antiviral ritonavir. Instead, the satellite, about the size of a large trash can and code-named Winnebago 1, continues to orbit the planet at nearly 30,000 kilometers per hour. The FAA may still regulate re-entry opera

UPDATE 1 March 2024: Winnebago 1 finally landed. On 21 Feb., the tiny, pharmaceuticals-making prototype space-lab made landfall at the Utah Test and Training Range in the U.S.—itself a landing strip for other space-faring experiments, including the OSIRIS-REx probe that grabbed a shovel-full of asteroid Bennu and returned to Earth with the sample last year. Varda Space Industries’ craft was testing the possibility that microgravity could be an ideal environment for some kinds of manufacturing, in this case the AIDS drug ritonavir, although the company promotes a range of microgravity pharma…

The Space-Based Drug Factory That Can’t Come Home - IEEE Spectrum

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