Varda Space secures first-ever commercial pharmaceutical manufacturing deal in orbit with United Therapeutics

Varda Space's first commercial pharma deal in orbit

Varda Space Industries has signed its first commercial pharmaceutical manufacturing deal, with United Therapeutics — a Nasdaq-listed biopharmaceutical company with a $25 billion market cap — committing its own balance sheet to produce physical drug compounds in low Earth orbit. Asparouhov describes it as the first time in human history that a public company has contracted to manufacture physical products in space. The first flight carrying United Therapeutics drugs is expected in 2026.

United Therapeutics focuses on rare pulmonary diseases and has a track record of reformulating drugs to improve patient access — shifting compounds from IV drips to inhalers, for example. The space manufacturing process targets the same kind of outcome. In microgravity, drug compounds can be crystallized into superior formulations that may change how they're administered or how efficacious they are. The canonical proof point is Merck's cancer drug Keytruda: crystallized on the ISS in 2019, the reformulation shifted administration from an IV drip to a subcutaneous injection, opening access for patients who can't reach IV clinics.

How the process works

Varda's approach uses microgravity as a single additional process variable. On the ground, scientists tune temperature, mixing rate, and solvent while varying gravity upward in centrifuges. Once those parameters are dialed in, the payload launches with the liquids pre-loaded — the shaking during launch doesn't matter because the phase change hasn't started. In orbit, Varda shuts down all reaction wheels and silences anything that could vibrate, then runs the crystallization from liquid to solid in as pure a microgravity environment as possible. Once solid, the compound is stable — Asparouhov's analogy is table salt, which survives a centrifuge indefinitely. The reentry heat is the real thermal challenge, but Varda's first mission demonstrated 14 degrees centigrade ± 0.1 degrees internal temperature control while the heat shield surface exceeded the temperature of the sun.

“For the first time in human history, there is a large publicly traded company, United Therapeutics — $25,000,000,000 in market cap — using their own balance sheet to go produce a physical product in low Earth orbit. This is literally the first time in human history where there are physical products being moved in space as a way to generate revenue. We'd expect by next year to fly the first United drugs.”

Flight cadence and competitive position

Varda is currently on missions W6 through W9, with seven and eight launching later this year. Asparouhov says that flying seven times in a single year would exceed the total historical cadence of the ISS, Space Shuttle, and Skylab combined for microgravity pharmaceutical work. By 2028–2029, he expects cadence to climb further. That density of flights, combined with fully private and autonomous operations, is what brought United Therapeutics to the table — prior ISS-based research had no equivalent commercial platform.

Pharma has also pulled in faster than Varda's own projections. Asparouhov says pharmaceutical revenue has come in roughly three and a half years ahead of the financial model Varda presented at its Series C last year.

What comes after pharma

Asparouhov's view on the broader product roadmap is direct: if 200 products are manufactured in orbit over the next decade, 195 of them will be pharmaceuticals. The company intends to go deep with roughly five to seven partners, one per therapeutic indication area. Ophthalmology is the next area under active evaluation — small powder volumes and limited alternatives for changing administration routes make it an attractive fit.

ZBLAN fiber, a material that benefits from microgravity production, is moving back toward the edge of viability after years on the backburner. Asparouhov notes that the addressable market has expanded — high-energy near-infrared weapon systems, quantum communications, and terrestrial data center photonics have all grown as use cases since 2021. At current trajectory, he puts a ZBLAN commercial program roughly four years out.

Semiconductor manufacturing in orbit is the furthest scenario. The process tolerances are orders of magnitude more demanding than a bioreactor or fiber draw tower, and Asparouhov doesn't expect it to be feasible within the decade.

The road to a space station

Varda's long-term architecture moves in deliberate steps. The current W-series burns up the satellite bus on reentry, recovering only the capsule. Generation two, targeting 2029, wraps the entire vehicle in heat shield material so both the satellite and pod survive — effectively a small reusable space plane. Beyond that, the plan is to park durable process equipment permanently in orbit, have the space plane ferry raw ingredients up and finished goods down, and gradually stitch those orbital assets together into something resembling a station. Human presence becomes justifiable only once the economics support it — Asparouhov frames it as: once you can justify one person with a wrench, the path to ten, a hundred, and a thousand follows.

For components Varda doesn't need to own — docking, warehousing, orbital maneuvering — the company is open to buying off the shelf. Starfish Space, a Seattle company, is cited as a potential docking and maneuvering partner. Gravitics is building dedicated warehouse vehicles that Varda might eventually use rather than build.

Launch market and public markets

Launch pricing from SpaceX has not declined since Varda started the company, despite falling internal costs. Asparouhov expects more competitive pressure to emerge over the next five years — Blue Origin's first external fundraise, Rocket Lab at a ~$65 billion market cap pursuing Neutron, and Stokes Space are all cited. Varda has booked launch capacity through 2029 and is not currently capacity-constrained. A key operational advantage is orbit flexibility: unlike most rideshare customers locked into sun-synchronous orbit, Varda can fly on both SpaceX Transporter and Bandwagon missions, the latter going to polar orbit for the first time later this year.

On going public, Asparouhov frames the decision as a cost-of-capital calculation rather than a milestone. Public biotech markets carry deep specialist expertise — hedge funds with MD/PhD analysts covering pulmonary disease and ophthalmology — which he expects will translate into lower cost of capital for Varda earlier than it would for a pure space company. His expectation is that Varda goes public sooner than an Anduril or SpaceX equivalent, precisely because the clinical data Varda generates maps onto frameworks public market investors already use to price pharmaceutical assets.

The TAM argument is blunt: Keytruda alone generated $25 billion in revenue for Merck last year. A single drug. Asparouhov's view is that most people in tech significantly underestimate what's available in pharma if you can demonstrably improve drug performance.