Varda Space's Will Bruey: Winnebago 5 landed, five capsules flown, launches booked through 2029 with bio-manufacturing focus

Speaker 4: Check. Check.

Speaker 9: Hey. Hey. Jordan and John. How are you? Can you hear

Speaker 4: Yes.

Speaker 1: Good to see you.

Speaker 4: And clear. Excellent.

Speaker 1: It's been it's been far too long. Obviously, we're here, you know, excited about Airborne, but I'd love to start with just, an update on are you are you running out of numbers for these capsules? How many are up there? How many have come back? You're gonna have to switch to to, you know, base 64 or something encoding them because the numbers are getting so high. Yes.

Speaker 9: I love that. Yeah. We are at Winnebago 5. Just landed a couple of weeks ago, so we're very excited about that. Number four is in in orbit. Number six gets shipped to launch late next week. Oh, thank you.

Speaker 4: Yes. Yes. Of course. We've got Yeah. Love that. So

Speaker 1: yeah. What are you actually learning in between these? Are they purely commercial? Like, someone just asked you, so you're gonna put one up. I imagine that you're iterating on hardware, software, regulatory, everything that goes into it. What are you what what's the what what what changes in between one launch to the next?

Speaker 9: We have, but we've hit that zero to one moment. I mean, we've hit the zero to five moment. So now we're moving from six and beyond. So yeah. Yeah. Very excited about that. So we are iterating on all the fronts you just mentioned. But luckily, now that we we have an assembly line going actually right behind me, there's two of them on the on the floor. That's great. We cut we put together and and bulk all of our changes into what we call block upgrades. And then so that'll occur about every year just like a car come, you know, comes off a line as as

Speaker 4: an iPhone.

Speaker 9: And Yes.

Speaker 4: It's a space iPhone. Space. Exactly. Exactly. It's like a faster, cheaper.

Speaker 1: It is. It is. Okay. So, you have a capsule. You can put stuff in that. Can I put a GPU in it yet?

Speaker 9: So technically, we have a data center, in orbit right now.

Speaker 1: You do? Okay. Yep.

Speaker 9: It doesn't as much compute as you may want, but it, you know, boxes of compute. So

Speaker 1: You're like, Dalian, shut up. This might be real. There's a chance.

Speaker 9: So actually, I should point you guys. Yes. We were featured in Morgan Stanley's Market Analysis that came out two days ago where they're looking at the microgravity manufacture oh, yeah. Yeah. That's what it's important. So, yeah, round of applause for Morgan Stanley. Yeah.

Speaker 1: It's really important.

Speaker 9: Forward thinking futurist bankers, my favorite on Wall Street. So, no, but they're coming out and taking the microgravity manufacturing industry seriously. Mean, a very sophisticated report and kinda hit up the nail on the head.

Speaker 1: Okay. And a lot of that is still bio focused, I I imagine?

Speaker 9: Yeah. So we're definitely focused on bio for at least the next five to ten years just because from first principles, it's the the most expensive dollar per kilogram. It has the biggest impact. It helps people. It makes economic sense, and it's a large market that we can scale into.

Speaker 1: It's highly differentiated. And the defense stuff is is interesting and orthogonal, but that, you know, is is is sort of a separate part of the business. Is that correct?

Speaker 9: Separate part of the business, but same part of the product. I mean, every single vehicle that comes off the assembly line can be either used for either use case. And so that really helps with with scaling. And so we just have a diversified revenue stream now.

Speaker 4: How are What kind of AI native tools, and I mean, AI native and that they were created after AI Tragic. Transformer Okay. Paper was was Yeah. Released. That you're what what kind of categories are you getting pitched that you're excited about around potential speed ups or already getting benefit?

Speaker 1: You mean like to purchase from Varda?

Speaker 4: Yeah. Rollout? Like tools that you're buying

Speaker 1: Oh, sure. Sure. Sure.

Speaker 4: Planning to buy that you're excited about outside of code generation?

Speaker 9: Yes. Outside of code generation. So Cursor, you know, excited about that. Excited about the new model. It's becoming so much easier to build the in house version of of those SaaSes that it really isn't, you know, for us. There's it's I'm laughing right now because the guy leading the effort here was up till 4AM last night just because he was so excited about it. We were looking at it. But what we did was we we what it what it does is it looks at Confluence, which is kind of like our our wiki at the at the company as it is. Based on the diff from Confluence over the past week, here is a report of everything that's happened at the company. It does time tracking. It does risk analysis. You know? And so it's like, it's it's awesome. It's awesome. We're

Speaker 4: really excited. Is it is it is it getting to the point where it can make recommendations to you of, like, here like, here's here's how you can speed up this part of the process, or is that kind of the next step?

Speaker 9: Yeah. Absolutely. We even ask it to give us a multiple choice.

Speaker 4: Really? Nice.

Speaker 1: Walk through, how launch costs are looking this year, next year. There was a lot of back and forth with Starship last year, Eventually, did, like like, massive progress in the back half of the year. And then the surprise for me was Blue Origin. And I think everyone was sort of like, oh, it's a space tourism company. And people were like, no. No. No. It's like a very serious company, and there's gonna be a real race. That feels extremely good for you. But do you do you anticipate the curve of launch cost to continue or change in some way? What are you seeing?

Speaker 9: Yeah. So I'll I'll tell you what I know. What I know is so we've right now, we've already booked all of our launches out through 2029.

Speaker 1: Oh, wow.

Speaker 9: And yeah. So we're we're launching four this year, seven year after that, ten year after that, twelve year after that. Wow. They're booked. Flight hardware is purchased. Yeah. The other thing I know is that, you know, when from a BARDA business model perspective, we're one of the few space companies that treats launches shipping, like, you know, and so we use SpaceX instead of FedEx, but from a business model perspective, shipping is shipping. Yeah. And so, you know, we're we're excited about new shippers coming online. You know, that'll probably induce some margin compression, which would be nice for for us payloads. But at the same time, you know, we're not gonna trans transition overnight. You can imagine if you were using FedEx and they had a, you know, a truck going a 167 times to the route that you want, and then all of sudden UPS shows up with one truck. Hey. I'm excited, and I can't wait for more. Yeah. But I I can't switch shipping quite yet at the current nascent aspect of the technology.

Speaker 1: Last question. Pick a side, moon or Mars. Who you got?

Speaker 9: I'm on team Mars, man. Yeah. Team Mars still. You know, I was oh, yeah. So I was, you know, I was I was cut my teeth Yeah. When Mars was That's amazing. I still think it is. Yeah. Absolutely. Like, I think the the you know, what I wanna be as my career ambition is Muddy the Mudskipper, you know, the first fish that it was an ugly scene, but the first fish that started to crawl onto land whose flippers were slightly more like legs. You know, it was not a glorious moment, but if you zoom out, it was an extremely glorious moment.

Speaker 12: So I'd

Speaker 9: like to be, you know, that ugly, you know, not quite, you know, ready for the next planet yet, but, you know, we show up.

Speaker 1: Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Moon, important testing ground, but Mars is the goal and will be truly multiplanetary. Moon doesn't moon base doesn't really count as multiplanetary. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Speaker 4: Great to see you all.

Speaker 1: Congrats on all the progress.

Speaker 4: We're still waiting for our capsule here in the dome. Right? Yeah.

Speaker 9: Yeah. We've got, you know, we'll

Speaker 1: They're gonna have too many. They're gonna need a whole storage facility for them in a couple

Speaker 4: We can be we can be trusted. We can be trusted.

Speaker 9: The the place is gonna invert. I'm gonna start paying you just

Speaker 1: to get Yeah. Yeah. You're gonna be like, I'm gonna go

Speaker 4: and win. Negative. I gotta hold on to it for regulation.

Speaker 1: Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And I'm also gonna tell you about Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com.