When Will Bruey talks about the future, the timelines are shorter than most might imagine. The Varda Space Industries CEO predicts that within 10 years, someone could stand at a landing site and watch multiple specialized spacecraft per night zooming toward Earth like shooting stars, each carrying pharmaceuticals manufactured in space. Within 15 to 20 years, he says, it will be cheaper to send a working-class human to orbit for a month than to keep them on Earth.
The reason Bruey thinks these scenarios are realistic is because he has watched ambitious business projections unfold before, while working as an engineer at SpaceX.
“I remember the first rocket I worked on at SpaceX was flight three of Falcon 9,” he said at TechCrunch’s recent Disrupt event. The partially reusable, two-stage, medium-lift launch vehicle has since completed nearly 600 successful missions. “If someone had told me ‘reusable rockets,’ and ‘[we’ll see as] many [of these] flights as daily flights out of LAX,’ I would have been like, ‘All right, [maybe in] 15 to 20 years,’ and this feels the same level of futuristic.”
Varda has already proven the core concept. In February 2024, after a months-long regulatory odyssey, the company became only the third corporate entity ever to bring something back from orbit – crystals of ritonavir, an HIV medication – joining SpaceX and Boeing in that exclusive club. It has completed a handful of missions since.
The company brings its pharmaceuticals back to Earth inside the W-1 capsule, a small, conical spacecraft about 90 centimeters across, 74 centimeters high, and weighing less than 90 kilograms (roughly the size of a large kitchen trash can). The company launches these capsules on an ad-hoc basis aboard SpaceX rideshare mission …