Varda Space lands second reentry capsule in Australia, plans 4 missions in 2025 including pharma and DOD payloads

Summary

Varda Space Industries just landed its second reentry capsule, bringing it down from Mach 25 into the Australian desert with an Air Force Research Laboratory spectrometer on board. Delian Asparouhov, Varda's co-founder and a partner at Founders Fund, confirmed the landing and said recovery teams were heading to the site within hours.

The AFRL payload was designed to stare out of the capsule window during reentry, characterizing the vehicle's plasma plume and comparing it against onboard materials. Asparouhov left the implication mostly unsaid — the technology is relevant to identifying what foreign reentry vehicles are made of.

2025 mission cadence

Varda plans four missions this year. Three are primarily DOD-focused, though Asparouhov says pharmaceutical payloads may still fly on some of them. One mission is primarily pharmaceutical. He expects the cadence to keep growing year over year, with incremental vehicle improvements between flights.

For now, Australia remains the landing site. The regulatory and physical conditions — an empty desert and a permissive legal regime — make it simpler than the US. There is no dedicated government reentry range in the US comparable to Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg for launch. Asparouhov says the new administration is aligned on fixing that, but the process of designating a military range takes time. Varda is also exploring private land options, which become viable as the landing radius shrinks. He described the current target zone as roughly a 100-kilometer circle, noting that number is ITAR-sensitive, and said it will get smaller over time.

Starship dependency

Varda built its business around Falcon 9, which now launches every 24 hours with a reusable first stage. Asparouhov says Starship is exciting but not in his near-term underwriting. He doesn't expect Starship to be a realistic ride for Varda's payloads before 2030, given SpaceX's higher-priority programs — Starlink, lunar, and Mars activities. Falcon 9 is the workhorse, and he's happy to use whatever else gets him to orbit, including Blue Origin's New Glenn, if it delivers.

Company size and hiring

Varda has 15 people, all based in the Los Angeles area. It is hiring on two fronts: pharmaceutical scientists with formulation, crystal engineering, or process engineering backgrounds as it expands its lab space, and aerospace engineers across firmware, flight software, avionics, structures, thermal, and mechanisms. Manufacturing engineering is also becoming a priority as the team begins transitioning from hand-assembled vehicles toward a more technician-led, partly automated production model.

Investing posture

On the Founders Fund side, Asparouhov says he has been investing more actively in recent months than he had in years, focused on founders building physical things. His preference is for people with generational ties to a manufacturing industry who are now integrating robotics and AI, not founders chasing what he calls the "atoms not bits" meme. His framing: a company cutting metal for future defense applications is more interesting than a TikTok captioning app, whatever the near-term margin profile looks like.

On the defense angle, he argues Varda is well positioned as the administration focuses on space-based deterrence. His line on the Australian landing: "This time we pulled the parachute — next time if you want us to not do that, we're happy to leave it."