Off-Nominal - 257 - Can You Fix Our RV? (with Nick Cialdella)

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

Jake and Anthony are joined by Nick Cialdella, CTO of Varda Space Industries, to talk about manufacturing pharmaceuticals in space, the reentry technology that brings them back to Earth, Varda’s hypersonic testbed, and the business case for making things in orbit.TopicsOff-Nominal - YouTubeEpisode 257 - Can You Fix Our RV? (with Nick Cialdella) - YouTubeSpace born, Earth bound • Varda Space IndustriesVarda Space Storefront: Hawaiian ShirtThe Definitive Winnebago Man - YouTube (…language warning)Winnebago Man | Full Documentary Movie | Jack Rebney - YouTube (…also language warning)Could this be the moment that drug manufacturing takes off in orbit? - Ars TechnicaFollow NickNicholas Cialdella | LinkedInFollow Off-NominalSubscribe to the show! - Off-NominalSupport the show, join the DiscordOff-Nominal (@offnom) / TwitterOff-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow JakeWeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to MarsWeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | TwitterJake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | TwitterJake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceFollow AnthonyMain Engine Cut OffMain Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | TwitterMain Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey SpaceAnthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | TwitterAnthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘Off-Nominal MerchandiseOff-Nominal Logo TeeWeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Go at throttle up. Negative return. Anthony, welcome to part two of Jake really wants to know about re-entry technology. Is this part two? Yeah, kind of, right? Did I do a Miko version as well, though? I think I did a little Miko appendix, so I think this might be a part three, right?

This is how good. We have show amnesia, Nick. We immediately forget everything we talked about right when we're done. The more of the merrier. Inversion? We never get talking about reentry. Outpost. Oh, I, that's, I had, we had outpost on here.

We had inversion on Miko. And now we're rounding out with Varda here. Welcome to Florida. Yeah. We got Nick Seadella with us. Now, welcome off the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Love to talk about reentry.

So happy to, happy to join the club. Jake's been mystified. So this is great. Yeah. No, I said on the, we had outpost on, I was telling them that like, I feel like all of a sudden the, the, the problem of getting stuff back from orbit, like, became suddenly really, really important that all these people started doing it. And I just was like, what's going on here?

So we started calling people and being like, can you please come tell us about your business? Yeah, you have to finish the loop of shipping. I mean, we get up there, but we got to come back. Sometimes you stay up longer than you planned on. You know, on occasion. A lot of us do also avoid Utah. So I get it. I'm just kidding.

I actually love Utah. Of the three of us, I probably like it the most. I would say. Oh, that's great. I know a lot more about Utah than I ever thought I would. Let me tell you that. But, I mean, one of the biggest ranges, you know, so it was a natural choice. A lot of history, cool history there, too.

There's the Stardust missions that, you know, that came in, Cyrus Rex more recently, you know. So, yeah, you know, the precedence obviously helps. Yeah, yeah. A storied open field. That's right. It's a flat, Jake. It's more of a flat than a field. flat.

More of a salt flat. Yeah. We got some good pictures out of it, though. That's really. That's my job to pull up, Jake. So you, you've got the show. Do you have another mead, Jake? Yeah.

I don't have a mead today. No, no. I'm rocking just a regular craft brew today from. Oh, there you go. Yeah. So this is a new one. I think I've had this before, but this is just a. Is that local?

What's with the little cross on top of that mountain? too. Put that back up here. Cross on top of the mountain. I don't know. Something Catholic. You know, it's Mexico. So this is from San Miguel de Allende, obviously.

Yeah. Good us. Delicious. So, Nicky got something fun? Well, you know, coffee, caffeine, the original space drug note. So, yeah, but it's in our in our Varda mug from our

W5 mission. So. Nice. Love it. You got mission mugs? On occasion, you know. So this one was our W-5-1 from earlier this year. We don't have them. We have some things on our shop.

We do have a mug, more of like a diner mug. Good structural integrity. But yeah, these ones are for the employees. Good structural integrity. We do have swag for each. We do have swag for each mission. So we'll do like, you know, of course, like patches, but we'll also do swag. There's a variant of the Hawaiian shirt on our shop.

as well. Really sick Hawaiian shirt, actually. You kind of like glance at it and you don't notice it's a Hawaiian shirt until you, or you don't notice that there's a spacecraft on it until you look closer. And you see, oh, there's a spacecraft and a capsule in there. So yeah, there's a variant of that one. I think you're going to get some sales out of this show. Shop.com. I feel like you guys will get some sales. So we wouldn't hate if you let us know how many sales you get. We've never done that. Yeah, we'll check that. We have no metric. we've never done advertising and never will. So if that's what you're hoping out of this,

you're not getting it. But if you're like a rad of Hawaiian shirt, just use the code, Jake and they'll let us know later. If you type the URL and please put UTM equals off nominal at the end of it. We'll raise the price. Right, right.

There you go. Yeah, yeah. No, no, it's cool. Sure. Awesome. Jake, I have a phone money for this. I've got a Cloud Walker. because I thought that's kind of what the dubs sound like.

The dub missions are cloud walkers to some extent. It's the best I can do. That's the W stands for. Maybe. What does the W stand? Great question, Jake. Let's start off with that. What does the W stand for?

Why W? It sounds like a government forum. W. No. Why W? We've, yeah, we're the employees that worked on the second mission, W2 employees? No. No, they were W2 employees.

No, we, so we originally, our first office for Varda was in an old RV repair shop. And in that case, that acronym is recreational vehicles. And so, and that kind of took hold a little bit because especially the first several months, we, yeah, we would get people coming by, you know, asking if they could, we could repair their RV. and the answer was like maybe, but you're probably not the people you're looking for. And so we kind of just, that kind of took hold. And then, you know, we started thinking about good things in media like, you know, breaking bad, making drugs in an RV. And then RV could be a reentry vehicle.

And so W.S. W.S. Winnabego. Hell yes. And that gives me a great opportunity to ask if any of you have seen the Winnebago Man video and specifically the documentary that then tracked him down. I don't think I have. Okay.

Listen, I know you got a lot going on over there, but I think maybe tomorrow you should have a all-hands viewing of the Rue Winnebago Man video, the viral video. The original, I think this was a viral video before the internet. Like, people would pass around a tape. I wasn't there for it, but that's what the documentary about the Winnebago man describes. It is a salesman in a Winnebago, just with the worst temper in the world. losing his shit over the flies that were infesting their shooting site in the middle of Iowa or something.

And it's awesome. And then this documentary found this guy like years later. People in the chat will know this. Amazing, amazing storyline of the early internet. So. All right. I'll have to look that up. Does Winnebago know that you named it W for Winnebago? I don't think so. You know, it's an internal, totally known name. Should they? Yeah. You know, I would have to, I don't know. I don't know. Probably not. would you pay them in Hawaiian shirts if they sent you a season to assist? We would definitely send his Hawaiian shirt. Okay.

If for nothing else, because I think it's a great shirt. Great question, Jake. What's your next one? Yeah, this is how I started to interview. I know. Okay, so I think maybe the good place to start would be to, I want to just start with like the business case, because I think this whole like pharmaceutical stuff that you guys are dealing in,

obviously is big and I know like very little about medicine. So like I just like I sometimes I read these things and like you read five sentences on what you know these pharmaceuticals things are doing. And by the time you get to the fifth sentence, you've already forgot what the first four mean because this is like all gobbly good. So maybe I could just hear from you like what what is the what is the business case here? What do you guys make it and what is the value for it, right? Yeah. So really There's two sides. I guess there's a business case and the technical need. So the technical need is when you're in microgravity,

you're really removing a lot of convective and buoyancy forces that otherwise would exist in the presence of gravity. And so that allows you to mix solution more homogenously. And why that matters is like ultimately that determines like what chemicals are in contact and how like either, you know, crystal nucleation forms or propagating. and so why does all that matter is that can allow you to do a couple of things. And to be clear, this is all research that's been done on ISS for decades. And really, we're just looking to commercialize it and bring it to the pharma industry as a whole. But why that matters is, you know, the example I'll give is if you can either increase the purity, maybe one, but more importantly,

like the particle size distribution or increase the concentration while keeping the viscosity low, then you can actually change the route of administration of a drug. So let's say there's a drug today that you have to go into a clinic and sit there for hours on an IV bag. You know, some of the challenges today with existing drugs is getting it into a form that can be taken into a shot. And so bringing something into microgravity, not every drug will be applicable. but bringing something into microgravity can allow you to actually change that route of administration,

really just change the patient experience on Earth. So that's like the punchline, the use case. But on the business side, what Varda is really focusing on is, cost is obviously important, but really it's about access. And access is really about two things. It's cost, of course, but also frequency. And so we need to be able to actually use microgravity up and back. And, you know, to date, we were, Varda was a third private, at least, a reentry capsule to have successfully returned.

The other two being prior to that, you know, SpaceX and Boeing's vehicles, which are human-rated vehicles for a very different purpose. And so that's, that's really like the end use case, is being able to change that route of administration or patient experience on Earth for humans. And our stuff like this, how much of this is things that have to, like, be, you know, manufactured in space versus, like, studied and research and understood in space, then you can bring it back to the ground and continue to manufacture that scale? You know, like, because that scale thing is the issue, right? Because it's, it's one thing to send one capsule up and prove something and, you know, get a thing, like get an artifact back of some kind that's, like, useful.

But if you want to have drugs that go to millions of people, then these little capsules are not going to hack it, right? Yes and no, it depends. So there's a couple of use cases there on the business side. So one is you can go to microgravity and make a seed crystal. So you kind of just think about like your sourdough red starter if you're into that at all. And so you can take a crystal made in space and then propagate on Earth. And that's, you know, with relatively low complexity molecules.

You're not going to do that with anything, you know, like necessarily with a biologic per se. you know, high, high complexity, thousands of atoms. But you can take seed crystals made there and then propagate them. And so then you can do mass manufacturing through that method. But there are also drugs today on the market in existing patient populations that our current size vehicle can support the existing annual supply. And, you know, we can think about it just in terms of like rare diseases, right? There's not maybe a massive patient population, but there's, that doesn't mean. there's not a need. And so there are there are definitely drugs today on the market that

are existing vehicle supply. But yeah, long term, you know, yeah, you might need to do more mass manufacturing. I mean, the super cool version of all this is that you have a factory permanently in space, right? And you're just ferrying the materials that you need to up and back. Because ultimately you'll still need to make the drug in space, but but bring it back for you know, large, large patient populations. But there will be certain, you know, drugs too that you're using microgravity to just think about it like another process parameter that a company can, a researching company can do, use and change like temperature, for example, but now you're turning of gravity

off switch. And so you're able to explore more of the design of experiments. and the case or maybe example I'll give there is that Merck went to the ISS with with their blockbuster drug now Ketruda and that was one of one of those things like you're you know example you gave where they took that research

back and and use that for earthbound production hmm that I'm surprised to hear that there. Yeah. No, I'm surprised to hear that there are drugs with small enough distribution that you could, like, I'm just thinking now, like, are that going to be like the most expensive drug in history? Because every time you take it, it's like, yeah, that had to go to space and back, you know. They already are, though. Like, I think that's kind of the case. Those kind of diseases already

are like that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, you know, and it's interesting, you can look at, you know, the economics of any of those, some of those drugs. And the cost of going to space and backs is actually well underneath what they need to to achieve, especially if you think about the cost of that patient population going to the clinic. And so it's it's not, it's not that the cost today to go to space and back, even with state of the art, is unbearable. It's actually access. I think access is the like more interesting term there.

It's the frequency. It's the accessibility. And so. Responsiveness. Yeah. Exactly the responsiveness. You know, we can't, we can't all of a sudden try to bring a drug to a patient population and you're like, well, the next shipment doesn't come for a couple of years.

You know, so it's not a, it's not a viable, you know, drug in that case. So is the adoption challenge there, though, like, I'm kind of wondering about, you know, we have a few examples that get brought up as tent pole like case studies in this. but the wider adoption across the industry, what do you find the hard parts of that? Is it that the scientists don't yet know when they should reach for using something like an in-space platform

or that they haven't adopted this as something that is in their repertoire of tools because the access is so limited? But how do you bridge that gap from researchers that aren't yet taking advantage of this or might not even know that they should be taking advantage of it for their particular application? How do you get through to that audience?

Yeah, I think that short answer is that's entirely the former or the latter of what you just said, which was not even knowing it's a tool in their tool chess. And really why that is is, like I said, this is research that's been done on the ISS for decades. This is not new science. We're not inventing new science here. And so really it's about making, you know, making reentry is commonplace's launch. And, you know, it's kind of something we launch is kind of something we take for granted today to a degree. It looks a lot simpler than I think it actually is and certainly wasn't easy to get there. But I think it's the same thing with reentry.

And really like our goal with our pharma partners is, to make the fact that we're going to space and back, sort of a black box. We need to kind of make it look like we just have a microgravity oven in the corner of our factory. And if they, you know, need a result or if they need another delivery of a drug, then we can just go and manufacture that

and we'll bring it right back, you know, within reasonable lead times. It's like the valet and Ferris Bueller's day off. You have no idea where the car went. You just know that it came back when you walked out of the place. Yeah, and in one piece. hopefully. Microgravity as a service.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Let's talk about Varda's like shape and size because that's where Jake's getting at that we've, we're running the gamut of reentry options. This is a probably an area of the market that looks the most distinct between competitors or options if you're not competing directly, which is probably, you know, the pie is big enough for everybody at this point. But you see like launch side, right? Everyone's got nine engines in the first stage. We've got one upper stage engine. Everyone, you know, converges to look like the Falcon 9 to some extent. Not the case with re-entry. We've got, so we, you know, we were saying we had outpost on the show who's got

shipping containers with parachutes is the ultimate landing version. We've had inversion. That used to be a picture of the inversion capsule, I guess this is a carousel, which is great for live production, which is a very lifting body looking thing. And then, then the VARTA approach is much more, you know, traditional return capsule looking. So talk us through, you know, how you kind of look at these different platforms, not necessarily what the other ones are good or bad at, but why is this the right fit for what you're trying to aim at? Yeah.

It really comes down to, again, that access of we want to make it make reentry as commonplace and launch. And the way that that has to happen is by actually executing against a reentry mission on a on a high cadence. And so you can kind of see that through Varda's slowly increasing or ramping launch cadence. And, you know, we just shipped, there's a factory behind me, we just shipped our next three going up in the next couple of weeks. And so, we're, you know, through six missions to date. I know three coming up.

And then another seven next year. And so really why that matters or why that's a. important is that that is what our architecture was built for, certainly to start. And again, it's about increasing that access and having that frequency of opportunity. And so we started out and our first few missions, you know, we partnered with Rocket Lab for our satellite bus. And we went and focused on the new novel part, the hard part, the part that wasn't done yet before, at least not at a high cadence at the scale. And so we sought to bring a new reentry vehicle to the market.

So that's what we did for our first, you know, a couple of missions and since then we've been flying our own satellite bus. But why that's, why that matters is we're really going for, you know, sort of a strategy of a shut up and play the hits. You know, we know what works, right? We're not, we're standing on the shoulder to giants and that is true in the entire aerospace. industry. Again, the important part is that we really get to this reliable cadence and access for our customers to make reentry a thing. And so we went with a relatively cheap simple capsule.

We throw away the bus every time. And again, like I said, the costs are not the problem. It's the frequency. So, yeah, relatively simple capsule. We have great partnerships with NASA, especially helping, you know, develop heat shields, you know, and that's what we've now manufactured in-house. And so really all built around passively stable reentry vehicle. It's kind of like throw it back at the earth, and it'll make it back, simple and cheap. As long as the people let you throw it back at the earth.

As long as you're allowed to. Yeah, that's right. I'll say it does look a lot. Because I know you guys use like the, it's PICA heat shields, stuff, right? Which is an old math of technology. And even the design, that sphere cone shape looks like, isn't that kind of the same as what we had for, it looks like the old Galileo Jupiter entry probe?

And I think that was also reused to the same thing. Yeah, or some of the sample return type missions. Star Dost did a similar scene, not quite 45 degree. But yeah, like this very similar sphere cone type approach. And it's all about like air to nap. stability. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, ultimately is what that's coming down to.

But, you know, some of those shapes, they require like spin stabilization or otherwise other stabilizing forces to keep it stable. But, yeah, ours is, again, yeah, intended to be nice and simple so that we can begin increasing access to space and iterate and evolve from their increased performance. You know, a lot of the other concepts and stuff out there are also going after, slightly different markets too. You know, there's like, there's certainly like cargo like components, but that's not really where we're focused. We're, we're focused on certainly the microgabia manufacturing part. So we have a science team that is in another building up the

street, you know, focused on the pharmaceuticals. But we also use our vehicle in a dual use way, where we also sell two government partners. So we've already done several missions to date on hypersonic test bed type application where we can test out new components in hypersonic representative environment, which in and of itself isn't conducive to like a lifting body. You want to be in these like higher hypersonic, higher flight path angle, higher mock regimes in certain regimes of flight so that you can get flight representative environments for what those end systems tend to use them for. So there's things like that. There's another exciting one like targets. as we look to expand and really test our missile defense systems, you know, domestically

and test those systems out as well. And so being a hypersonic reentry vehicle of our shape has very specific applications that it's more appropriate for. Pointy. Very pointy. Yeah. Pointy the better. Pointier, the better.

Exactly. So are all, Well, off-usegate the question, Anthony. When would be the first W that isn't going full orbit? Is that ever going to be a thing? What do you mean, isn't going full orbit? Are you flying on a haste anytime soon, doing some orbital stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it seems to mean.

Yeah. Good question. You know, we've certainly been asked about it by our partners. And, yeah, that would be another way to, get even higher hypersonic or higher heat flux maybe if that's kind of what you're interested in testing. But not currently planned this year. So we're working, you know, again with our partners on, like I said, focusing on that

hypersonic test bed. There's actually quite a backlog of like payloads and components in development that don't have a way to go Mach 25 for cheap. And so we're, you know, we're TRL as a service, sort of, right, in that, you know, technology-reliating this level of the service. So that's something that we're, you know, we're supporting building. But then, like I said, also targets. So really those two are those two are the real focus in the near term.

But, yeah, we've certainly been asked about sort of suborbital emissions like haste and stuff. I'm sure, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing, nothing evades their reach. so nice NRO patch reference

confirmed you bet you're best one the octopos right oh yeah so you know

if you looked at the list of missions the name transporter would be on there a lot are you as concerned

as the discourse at the moment of the death of the transporter mission um no

am I as concerned No, I mean, I think this time in the launch industry is fascinating. I think like the fact that we're seeing the evolution of a ride chair, you know, mission concept through a potential end. And while also seeing the advent of a new launch vehicle by the SpaceX Starship, you know, hopefully launching again in the next couple of weeks, hopefully coming up. I'm sure you guys are going to watch that. And, but also all these other launch providers, which are, you know, more recently there's been even European launch providers that have launched. And, but, yeah, there's Rocket Lab, of course, is launching all the time now with electron. I'm sure neutron's coming online soon.

And so, like, I really think this is just a fascinating time in terms of, like, well, companies have to be agile, of course. But that probably wasn't ever the case. not the case, right? And so that's something that, you know, I'll say Varda is almost fortunate in the sense that we're just there for the microgravity. So we'll take whatever I can get. You know, there's like maybe some orbit, you know, inclination constraints and things, depending on our landing site.

But yeah, no, it's, I mean, we're there to be in orbit in microgravity for a few weeks, month type of time frame. So no, and ultimately too, like Vard is well positioned. Like we have missions on the books for the next couple of years through 2028. And so I think we'll have to adapt. Yeah, of course, as the industry evolves, but not concerned. Do you think like to expand on that question a little bit, right? So Starship coming online and, you know, could be the,

we talk about Falcon going away, but I think Starship stepping into that role could mean that nothing really changes that much, right? And Starship comes with reentry built in if you think about it, right? So like, do you ever, do you think about that? Or the platform that you have underneath the capsule, you could just dump that into the nose of a Starship and keep going, right? And then you're just buying, you're just buying space on the way up and down, right? Yeah.

I mean, I think, you know, once really once any of any of these technology, or commodities. I think that those are all possibilities, and frankly, I think that's just better for Varda. And, you know, I think there are definitely challenges along the way. Like, for example,

are you going to really, are you going to want to tie up an entire starship as an asset to stay on orbit for this manufacturing mission alone? Or are you going to want to deploy it, let it go off and do its thing? But, you know, ultimately, too, like, as the, call it space shipping,

ecosystem evolves. You're going to want the semi-truck, but you're also going to want the last mount delivery. And so, you know, I think there are always, you know, opportunities or pockets for all sizes and scales, you know, and that's kind of to your point earlier, right? Like the ecosystem system and the pie is big enough really for all these variant, barrier scales.

But ultimately, I don't really ever see, you know, at least for C right now, an end to W series in the sense that there are these other like government hypersonic tests and, you know, high frequency, low cost applications, even, you know, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals that that is still really valuable. Yeah, it's interesting. It's like it's that constant tension we always have between like, do you want a cheap bulk ride where you don't control the, you know, the time or the direction or the duration or do you want

a bespoke smaller mission that's maybe more expensive per kilogram, but you have complete control over where it goes, when it goes, how it goes, all that kind of thing, right? It's like that. It's the electron versus transporter question over and over again, right? Yeah, exactly. And I think there's even another dimension to that, too, where you, yeah, maybe you only want to test a few small things. You know, not necessarily even having just total control, but like, you only want to test a few small things. So even just like the capital outlay that you have to have to like go and run that test or that screen.

you know, you don't necessarily want to book a whole star ship for that. Yeah, yeah. It'd be cool, though. Pretty cool. It's super cool. And if they let us. Again. They let us.

That's the point. Currently, outlooking not great. I don't think they're going to let us. But, yeah, we have a weird theory that, like, the days of SpaceX just wanting to sell launches to other people are numbered because they've, told us that theirs are worth so much more than ours, so they're just going to eat them all. So that's a sub-theory we have. Interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's plausible. Yeah. But I think the Varda idea pairs really nicely with something like a Stoke Nova, even little Nova. Like that's, it's like a perfect pairing for something like that, right? Yeah. Yes.

There's, it is. It is like kind of a quirky platform, but then when you look, because three tons to orbit, even on Little Nova is like, not that much, but fine for you guys. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, totally. Yeah, and I think that's, you know, like that's why I think about this entire time that we're currently in in the launch industry is just fascinating because there, I think we're going to see all of these

sort of modes of transportation, you know, come online and, and yeah, like I said, I think that more opportunities or other providers going to orbit is only a good thing for us. If you look at how different 2016 was from 2011, that was pretty weird in terms of space world. But I feel like 2031 compared to 2026 is going to look really weird.

Like, I don't know. We're all, you know, us and people listening right now are in it. Like this is the real niche. You're talking to like the niches of the niches right now. So we're the most prepared as anybody for how weird it's going to look. But I feel like it's weirder than even most of the people listening are ready for. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I know. I mean, I was fortunate enough to be a small part of that 2011 to 2016 change. And that was weird. It was very weird. A bit of a weird time. But, like, yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think what the ecosystem looks like in five years is very, very different. nothing will be like it is now

Starlink will still and that's about it honestly. I'll be a little sad if Falcon's not flat anymore. I mean as a special place in my heart I worked on it so it was yeah that counts we've seen enough of them yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

yeah it's it's weird like we're about to watch SpaceX basically lap the other rocket providers right it's like they're still trying to figure out how to compete with Falcon 9 and they're about to debate and switch it for the whole other brand new thing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so much so they're like, yeah, they're like, hey, we got, we got our own payloads to fill on this. And so, yeah, it's, yeah, it's, it's cool. It's, it's cool. You know, I don't think anyone would have guessed that this would have been the outcome, you know, 10 years ago, five years ago. I remember when we were all hoping for that magical utopia where SpaceX inspired, you know, two or three other rocket companies to do the same thing.

We had this glorious, competitive, diverse market of lunch providers. And launch was like $10 million for 20 tons to orbit. You know, like it was that did not materialize. But Nick, how do you, what is your read on that, though? The diaspora of the people that left SpaceX from, you know, your era to now. Like, how do you feel about where everyone went to work and what challenges they were taking on? Because I feel like we've talked to many alumni working on. so many different segments of the market.

And that's an interesting dynamic in itself. I mean, you're sitting in El Segundo, so you probably can throw a rock and hit a couple of these offices from where you're at right now. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think it is maybe barring, like, the Apollo era. It's like definitely the coolest time in aerospace

industry to be a space fanatic in engineering in this region. because there are so many cool ideas and like so many new applications being developed from all the all the folks that helped bring you know that economy to life and yeah and I think like you know I think you're I think we're seeing it in all those companies of like all the different modes of transportation or solutions that we can actually now use given that like access to orbit is a thing. And so I think it's, I think it's great. I, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm excited for what the future holds. And ultimately, like, when I first joined the SpaceX, you know, obviously rockets are cool, fun, fun to work on. And, but like, it was the existentialist sort of in me that was like, I want to work on this because I want the future where orbit, access to orbits a thing.

I want to see the world that I grew up, you know, watching Star Wars. wars and like I want to see that world and mine is the Death Star well I don't know if this is cool that's not cool maybe the use of it is not great I don't know if it was a giant on-orbit

manufacturing facility it's okay yeah yeah yeah exactly it's no moon it's a re-entry vehicle off the workshop the name thing but yes yeah the death farting yeah I don't know about that but maybe something.

It's the death part, Jake. The star was fine. As he knows, as he knows coming from SpaceX, star was fine, Jake. Yeah, star was good. The only part they can. But yeah, you're seeing this economy

like really, really blossom, which is cool. And that was, and that was what I got excited about, you know, first joining and now hoping to bring

a new portion of that spacing, space logistics, uh, to light. The thing I found kind of annoying about the post-IPO discourse was the focus on the SpaceX diaspora going off and founding new ventures and treating that as siloed. Like they left SpaceX and their allegiances are their new place and SpaceX.

And not the fact that like y'all worked together and then went and founded other things also and probably still talk to each other. Like the space actors that went to work at Stoke are still friends with the spacexers that went to work everywhere else also. And as are you with the people that work everywhere else. So like the cross-pollination, I don't think, stopped immediately because no one worked at SpaceX together anymore. It's like, no, this is a whole segment of the market that went off and probably will collaborate again. Not always because it's the most economical choice, but it's because there's trust between you and someone that works over at a different company that's offering a different part of the market. and that crossover is a thing that we haven't seen yet

because everyone's still working on their first couple missions at their new place. But like let that develop a couple years and the cross-pollination circles back on itself and because the people that want to talk about the IPO aren't really thinking about that aspect. I feel like that's what Jake and I will be talking about in four or five years from now.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you're going to see like all of that like collaboration. Like, you know, even at like a cultural level, right, We all kind of think alike. You know, yeah, I have friends, a name a startup, you know, around your aerospace. But it's, yeah, it's like, it's that network that, you know, maybe you catch each other at a bar or something. And then, you know, often we talk about the talent competition around here. But, you know, but, again, it's like, it's, we're all still part of the same ecosystem.

And we're investing in that sort of next generation of what we think. think is going to really help, you know, blossom this economy. But I wish you to talk about that more because everyone just right now is in this like rags or riches mentality of like how bleak space is because SpaceX wants to cancel dragon and isn't going to fly transporters anymore. Whereas I'm like, no, but there's a good part that we haven't, we haven't gotten to the good part of that storyline yet when like all these people still trust each other a lot and they're like, oh, hey, your thing and my thing.

If we put them together, imagine what we could do with that. We haven't gotten to that part yet, but that seems like the really fun part. part. Yeah, I mean, it's the, it's the next generation of the PayPal mafia, the SpaceX mafia. So like, it's the same, you know, the same next evolution and, and, um, sometimes literally, yes. Sometimes literally. Yeah. All right, we have, I have a question that circling back on technical tech stack. What is the, we're talking about the shapes of reentry vehicles. What is the thing that is the most limiting aspect of the VARTA

shape and size in the W series. I guess maybe we can get the other letters if and when they exist. But like what you're looking at right now, what are the things that don't fit in that package that you want to get to? Good question. Well, so the main challenge with a reentry vehicle like ours, but this is really true of like, really most reentry vehicles, just the envelope size maybe is different is like your center of gravity placement in the vehicle.

that's like really really critical. You kind of think like, you know, balancing your tires. And so we're quite literally, you know, controlling our center of gravity down to like the millimeters level. And so, you know, part of that is so we can be precise and have the highest performance vehicle we can, you know, we can achieve. But also part of it is based on, you know, the architecture itself. So as you change your vehicle architecture to have more control or control surfaces or things like that, you can increase that envelope. So that's probably the most limiting thing. But I think really like the next thing would be as we look to future developments, you know, we're really it's about like it will start focusing on either cost or again cadence.

but through reuse, you know, go back to the classic comparison of like throw away the airplane every time after a flight, not, you know, expensive, sure, but also like, we've got to build in our airplane. So that's a problem. And that's going to take time. And so I think like that's kind of the real limiters. But I don't think we're looking at those types of limitors for several years. Yeah. I guess you could, I mean, that first problem you can solve with scale, right? Like a bigger vehicle would be those millimeters matter less on a bigger vehicle, right? And you can, you can have a little bit more control over that. I have to ask that question. Again, this is, is that are the books already? I mean, most, the MO for space startups is like some small thing that can be cheaply

prove the concept. And then you, you dovetail into the next larger thing that's actually already It's like the Falcon one to Starship pipeline, right? Like how do you think about that? Is there another bigger vehicle coming down the line that you think would be a ticket to more growth and more scale? In Varda's future, probably. But I don't think, again, we have any near-term limiters that that's a necessity. As in VARTA can be successful both with our existing hypersonic target. etc.

Use cases on the government side, as well as all of the early and several drug applications today with our current size vehicle. I think, another thing, a lot of sort of talk about is like reuse, right? And that we're actually already doing in some form, just not necessarily at like the full capsule level, but we are starting to run out of space for capsules that we bring back.

You keep looking over there. like, we have to know what's to your right. You keep looking over there. Every time you're reference in a vehicle, is there a bunch? Yeah. Yeah, there's a couple of them laying around here. So they make good, yeah, they make good factory tour, um, uh, show pieces basically. So, uh, yeah, we have a, we have a couple of them laying around.

Uh, I would you rate on my scale? I have a personal scale when I tour space factories of how likely I am to trip over stuff in the factory. Like, am I going to trip over space rated hardware? all the time, much of the time, or none of the time. Ooh, good question. None of the time. None of the time.

Is that because you're orderly or because there's not a lot of it around? Orderly. Okay. That's better. Yeah, yeah. We have to. Exactly. You guys have a lot of Mike Pence.

Don't touch the signs around, I assume. Right. Right. So, I mean, yeah, we have clean rooms. We've really newly built in the facility as well. and to, you know, again, organize the different, like, factory stations. But no, yeah, we're building things. I mean, like I said, we just, we just shipped three.

There's another two in the clean room behind me. And we have, you know, inventory full of parts that we need to start converting into spacecraft. You also have, I'm in the Philadelphia area. I know about pharma people. You have pharma people coming around. They definitely want you to be nice and orderly, nice and clean. Nothing should be touching anything. Yeah.

Strict no touching policy in pharma places. Exactly. Lab codes. Yeah, you got to, I mean, we have our, we have our pharma building up the street. And, yeah, those labs are immaculately clean, you know, like, again, you're, it's material processing. You can't, you can't contaminate, you know, what you're working on. And so, yeah, it's important. Where does, like, where does Varda end on the, the manufacturing side?

like are you just the vehicle or are you doing some of your own like development for for the test bed inside and are you doing your own actual research like could you ever see yourself getting into the actual drug side of it and like manufacturing and selling the drugs themselves yeah so um on the like vehicle and reentry side uh we manufacture our own pica uh our own heat shields um we we also manufacture our own um so we use a picae on the forebody, but we use our own internal heat shield on the aft body, the spherical part. And so, and, you know, fortunately, we have a test bed. We can access easily. And so we can test new materials. And, and, you know, sometimes we fly pucks for customers. So like, you know, like a one inch diameter, half inch diameter, sort of like a circular puck that you can embed in an heat shield, then an instrument. And so we do that.

And then, of course, we get to recover it. And so we get to do like post-flight analysis. But that's all, you know, like purpose built for VARTA or used for VARTA purposes on the on the test bed side. And then of course, because we're flying, we'll use our platform to build flight heritage and test end-to-end systems before they go into prime time, basically. And then so that's all on the vehicle side. But on the pharma side, yeah, we, you know, we're heavily. invested in bringing that first killer app of microgravity to market. And so we're building the internal processing hardware, mixing solutions from different chambers and vials,

and ultimately crystallizing. We have, like I said, a science team, a little over 30 people ish now, just focused on pharmaceutical development. So that building up the street that I I've referenced a couple times is just pharma labs at all stages of really formulation development. So you can kind of think of ARDA, at least in the pharma side, as like a formulation development company, but working with partners on their drug assets that have some, you know, challenge they want to overcome. So, you know, we recently announced a partnership with United Therapeutics. And so we're, you know, we're partnering with them on bringing the first drug to all.

orbit with the intent of putting it into a human. And so what that looks like today is, you know, we're working with them at that, in that lab to, to evaluate those drugs before bringing them to flight. That's wow. So really we see ourselves like through the chain of formulation development, I don't think necessarily VARTA brings anything unique to like clinical trials, for example.

Yeah, yeah. We're really, really in that front matter of the value chain. And that allows us to, you know, yeah, we take on some risk, but we also get to live in the upside. And so if that, you know, if and when that drug gets to market, you know, we'll have a piece of that of that intellectual property. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. So you don't necessarily lead the charge on it, but you're a stakeholder, right?

Or the enabler of it almost. Yeah, like the enabler, I think. Yeah, exactly. Because we're, you know, what we want to offer to our partners and what we are, you know, as we're working with United Therapeutics, is we want to help them solve a problem, not necessarily just say, hey, go run this recipe, you know. There's a problem that they have. And we're uniquely capable of using a gravity switch to help them address that problem. And so, you know, it doesn't mean that every drug that everyone brings us, we're going to fly. we're going to do as much rigor as we can in the ground before we say, hey, this is actually worthy of a flight,

and really have like that sort of front matter filter, and then bring something to flight if we believe we can help us solve it. So does that mean like XRG tests before going actually up to reentry vehicle? Is that something that is in the realm of utility at Varda, or is it the fact that you guys are making it economical enough that you're like, no, this seems like the math checks out we should fly this. Yeah, more the latter. It's, but you can, you can do a lot on the ground

to study a process of sensitivity to gravity. And so, you don't necessarily have to bring it to zero G to do that. You could also increase gravity. Centrofuge is an option. Now, that's easier. That's not the only, yeah, it's a little easier.

You also don't have to vomit. You can't, yeah, keep it down on the bottom. But, yeah, it's, we can study it in multiple ways. And it's not just, you know, changing gravity alone, but it's also, like, understanding the chemical process itself, you know, really, like, you know, if you think about, like, molasses, like a really thick fluid, not that you would be crystallizing a drug in molasses, but the fluid itself is so thick. It's usually the source of the problem is not the, not the, there is.

That's right. That's right. But yeah, you know, like a solution like that isn't inherently going to be super conducive to having a strong gravity effect. Is it more than zero, of course? But, you know, those, those processes with something like that, for example, are going to be more strongly dominated by other chemical forces. Like it's not as, you don't get as much out of that being the variable as you do as other. process. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, exactly. So you can study those things on the ground and build enough confidence that you know that this is like this is a viable direction to try out and it's worth the marginal cost of it. Yeah. And then there's also applications where it's not, you know, just studying gravity sensitivity per se, but there are existing problems today and there's actually a large category of these things where even just scaling up the volume and the size of any one reaction is the challenge for highly complex molecules. So again, like thousands of atoms,

biologics, like proteins. And so that's actually like a large category of drugs where, you know, you have to make sure you can control your process well, of course. But as you look to scale, you will encounter challenges where in the presence of gravity, you can't scale further from like a volume or scale standpoint. And so that's actually just a large category of molecules you can just you can almost outright say, not quite, but, and to say, hey, this, we can scale it past this if we if we go into making gravity. But that would probably need the airstream series of vehicles, I assume is the next one. Yeah. So what does the airstream have? It just looks cool.

It's shinier. It's nicer. It's busier or what? Beautiful silver riveted. Yeah. Yeah. Good on Instagram. Like what else does it happen?

It's an influencer space. Yeah. You guys are hiring influencers. Right, right. Exactly. Exactly. Well, it's in it, though. You don't have to tell us specifically.

But if you were to have an airstream, what would be the thing that would be different about that series to the Winnebago? Oh. Yeah, I mean, scale, for one. But I think that's really... There is a shiny silver vehicle that you might fly a bigger scale thing inside. It's shiny like an airstream, hypothetically. If you were going to do something new, right? The man responsible may live in an airstream that might be a great pairing for the vehicle that's named Airstream.

Is that what you're getting at? I don't know, something like that. Cool. Yeah, it's, you know, it's thinking about... about where, yeah, what that might be, I guess, landing precision, maneuverability in flight, that type of stuff. Again, it goes back to like the earlier question around, like, what are the limitations or constraints of W series?

Well, I'm not going to go and just redesign that. You know, I would do something a bit off access from that. That can add, say, like a net new capability. But yeah, I mean, those constraints aren't, in the near term for for Varda. Do you think that's a case where these are two products that would exist alongside each other? Because I think we talked about this a lot last week, Jake, with the Stoke news, right? That like a lot of times people are like, new version, old version goes away entirely.

It's like very rarely are there space companies that are like, now we have two products. That's almost never a thing. It's only like, oh, it's the new. You want to be on the new thing. Like update immediately. Yeah. I mean, I have a lot. lot of love for the burn the ships model. It's great. You know, it's commit, you know, or die trying.

But I think in the, I think in the case of Varda, something like that would see both have, have those use cases. We talked about it before when, you know, there's a very specific regime of flight that W-Series flies uniquely. And, you know, I mentioned being off-axis. If you were going to do something like that, then it should be off-axis, also in that way. And, and so you can increase that envelope for one purpose, but you take a cost in another. And so, yeah, in that hypothetical, I would say, yeah, they both exist. Right.

It is funny, though, because I feel like the space industry is so committed to, like, we have one product, and it's the best thing we've ever made, and it solves every use case you could possibly list for our company, and there's no other product. Like, if every car brand had just one car, and it was like, we had a sedan, and then we thought an SUV is better, because you could fit more shit in it. So now it's just the SUV.

that's all you can buy. You can buy an SUV and it's better. Everyone that bought a sedan, now they get an SUV and it's like, I didn't want one. I wanted the other thing. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. No, they, you know, as time goes to infinity,

something needs to be purpose built for its application. Yeah. Period. Space seems super resistant to that, though. Like, people want to, people want to own every use case and not specialize.

I think Starship, some of the biggest criticisms that I could levy against Starship is that. Is that like, everything flies through stars, but every plane in the world looks different. There's fighter jets and there's Cezna's and there's C-130s and there's so many different planes,

but you're using the analogy that like this can be, you know, if everyone flew a 747 everywhere. And it's like, but that doesn't make sense in that case. Right, right. Yeah, you're not, you're not flying a C-130 to haul, you know, the most things across the world. Yeah, I think, I mean, if I had to guess and really just, I guess, my opinion on this.

I think that's more borne out of how hard space is, and the hard tech and the capital-intensive nature, than necessarily being the absolutely correct answer in all cases. You know, it's... The forcing mechanism of, like, the margins are so slim that doesn't leave you with their options because we're also so young in the industry. Exactly. The industry and the market is so nascent, you know, despite having been launching, I mean,

credit SpaceX and Rocket Lab and companies like for decade more now at a very high clip, it's still nascent. And, you know, and you see that every day with, it's not like every companies, every mission's been successful at always. You know, it's still hard. And so it's capital intensive and and you know talent is competitive and so like you know it is it's probably more about bringing focus and

but yeah I do think there is an affliction point at some point in the industry that where yeah you do start again you see all modes of transportation you're not flying the 747 for every leg as cool as that plane is probably a bias that we feel like we are space particularly, but like modern world,

we feel so technologically advanced, but we fail to remember that like, boats were invented 10,000 years ago, but it took 9,000 and change to come up with modern shipping that changed economics. Like, we had 9,800 years of boats before we came up with modern shipping or whatever. But we feel like space is so far long

that we skipped that whole very early era. Right? And like, you look at airplanes and like, what were we doing the first 20, 30, 40 years was very different than what changed the world in the 70s and 80s. But we think we jumped like, we got the Atlas 5 and then we were like launching direct TV and serious satellites and like that was it. We nailed it. We probably didn't. Yeah, yeah. 40 years. No, no, no, no, not at all. I mean, that's what's exciting though.

It's like, I think truly this is just the beginning, which is cool. but yeah we're still very nascent we need to yeah but we're all impatient too we want it and we want it now so yeah it's like why

why not and like how can we accelerate that that yeah that's by the way your customers say that sounds like straight out of your customer's mouth yeah once or twice yeah

I was going to say that this interview has made me remember how complex material sciences and how I don't know anything about it. Jake and I are glad we do software is what he means. Yeah, yeah. It's exciting over here, though. I know, it is. We're not moving to L.A., unfortunately, for you. No.

Yeah. No. Well, if you're ever in there, yeah, come by. That's definitely going to happen. once again I said I live just outside of Philadelphia which like every farm company in the world is in so next time you're here because you probably are sometimes and you don't need to tell me who but I'll come visit you in the Navy yard.

Sounds good. We'll keep in touch. I have several family members that work for Merck and GSK and list off every other one that has an office around here. It's a big industry. Farm industry is huge, such a huge market. So yeah, a lot of opportunity. awesome yeah man well anthony do you want to talk about next week i think this interview is um this one

this one came out of your mailbox of some kind right yeah i was just pulling up this uh this thing here uh this is the this is a titan uh titan focused episode check we got daniel drew who is working on solid state propulsion for autonomous reconnaissance of karst Spark, robots that are going to go into caves in Titan. Look at this graphic. Tell me this graphic doesn't look like our show. It lands on Dragonfly, and then this ball that looks like the thing that you train, if you're Luke Skywalker, that you train to be a Jedi with, and it flies into a cave of

Titan. What the hell's going on with this mission? This is basically what we're trying to figure out. Yeah, that's awesome. So that's happening. Yeah, that's cool. It exists. We sent an email and he said, sure.

So this is what we're here for, Jake. Yeah, yeah. So good. Awesome. Well, Nick, thanks so much for coming on. This has been great. Thanks for answering my questions. I'm still learning about this industry and this has been good.

So, yeah. Thanks for having me. I can talk about reentry all day. I can't wait, Jake, to go to Canada by cheap drugs that were made on VARTA vehicles. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. There'll be a EU-terrorer now, though.

First space drag coming soon to a clinic near you. Love it. All right, y'all. We'll see you soon. All right. Thanks, everybody. See you. One, two, three, four, five, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.