Varda Space Industries, a California-based startup working on the futuristic orbital economy, successfully completed its second reentry of the year when its W-6 capsule landed safely at the Koonibba Test Range in South Australia. On board this mission were payloads from NASA and Sandia National Laboratory (SNL), looking to address national security needs.
The privatization of space in the US has shifted the onus of launching new projects from government-owned defense and space agencies to private players. The success of SpaceX and Blue Origin has shown that private players bring innovations, lower costs, and can help accelerate the pace of space exploration.
Alongside cargo movements and launching people to space, private participation is also helping the US explore other areas, from additive manufacturing in microgravity to pharmaceutical processing and innovative defense projects to hypersonic capabilities. El Segundo, California-based Varda Space is a participant in both orbital pharmaceutical processing and hypersonic capabilities and has made major advances in the latter this year.
Since Varda’s expertise in pharmaceuticals is made in space, it needs to be brought back to Earth for it to be used. Instead of relying on other partners to bring its cargo back to Earth, Varda developed its own hypersonic testbed for reentry and orbital flight testing.
Working with the Department of War, it also leverages this platform for testing novel ideas in an extreme hypersonic reentry environment. This involves working with Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and other commercial space entities, working to address national security needs.
The W-6 mission was funded by the Prometheus program and consisted of three major payloads from NASA and SNL.
First among the payloads was an autonomous navigation system that used imagery of space objects like stars and low-Earth orbit satellites to determine its position during hypersonic reentry. The high speeds during this phase create plasma around the vehicle, which leads to a communications blackout. An autonomous navigation system will aid both commercial and national security missions during this phase.
The W-6 mission also featured a nose tile developed by the SNL, which had embedded sensors capable of recording temperatures in the reentry environment. These sensors will help compare data from the computer model predictions and real-world measurements since hypersonic reentry conditions are impossible to replicate on the ground.
The data from the nose tile will help design heatshields for hypersonic reentry for other vehicles in the future, like the tiles provided by NASA as a payload on the W-6. Two instrumented shoulder tiles on the W-6, produced using an alternate production technique, were used on the W-6, and data will be analyzed by researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.
“Every reentry builds on the last. W-6 is another demonstration that frequent, low-cost, reliable return is easily accessible,” said Dave McFarland, Vice President of Hypersonic Test and Targets at Varda, in a press release. “The data our partners are taking home from this mission would have taken years to collect through traditional testing methods.”
Varda Space is now working to increase its mission cadence and hopes to serve more government and commercial customers with its expanded vehicle production and flight testing in the near future.
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Ameya is a science writer based in Hyderabad, India. A Molecular Biologist at heart, he traded the micropipette to write about science during the pandemic and does not want to go back. He likes to write about genetics, microbes, technology, and public policy.
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