Varda Space Industries, a California-based in-orbit manufacturing company, successfully recovered its third reentry capsule on Wednesday, providing important new data for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) critical hypersonic research efforts. The achievement highlights the defense potential of high-speed reentry technologies beyond Varda’s space-based manufacturing capabilities.
Varda’s W-3 capsule, funded by AFRL, was launched into space on March 14 aboard Rocket Lab’s Pioneer satellite. The Pioneer satellite supported the capsule’s core systems, including power, communications and propulsion. After a nearly two-month orbital mission, the W-3 capsule successfully landed at Koonibba Test Range in southern Australia on May 13.
This particular Varda capsule carried an inertial measurement unit (IMU) specifically built for the Air Force by Innovative Scientific Solutions Incorporated. This advanced IMU is designed to allow systems to determine their own location and maneuver without the need for external navigation sources such as GPS. This technology is especially important for military operations where GPS access is limited or blocked.
According to the information shared by Varda, the W-3 capsule re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere at an incredible speed, exceeding Mach 25. This extreme speed is considered an “extreme” environment that could provide the military with unique and valuable data on how systems perform under real hypersonic conditions. Such data is critical for the development of future hypersonic vehicles and defense systems.
“The W-3 mission will provide unprecedented data to advance next-generation space and defense capabilities and continue to provide hypersonic environments to the reentry test community,” said Dave McFarland, Varda’s Vice President of Hypersonic and Re-entry Test. McFarland emphasized that this mission will make significant contributions to the knowledge of hypersonic flight and reentry technologies.
Varda Space Industries was initially founded in 2021 with the vision of sending satellites into space as “manufacturing facilities” and manufacturing a variety of high-value products, from pharmaceuticals to fiber optic cables, in this zero-gravity environment. The company’s return capsules travel at hypersonic speeds, which led key agencies like AFRL and NASA to see the potential for using these vehicles as high-speed, reusable test beds. This collaboration helped Varda secure a $2023 million strategic funding boost from AFRL, NASA, and several private investors in 60. Last November, AFRL awarded Varda another four-year, $48 million contract to continue testing military payload re-entry through a program called Prometheus.
Varda recovered its first successful re-entry capsule in Utah in 2024, and its second capsule in February of this year at the Koonibba Test Site. The company’s fourth spacecraft is currently undergoing integration and testing at Rocket Lab’s Spacecraft Manufacturing Complex in California.
The company said the first two successful missions clearly demonstrated the versatility of the W-series vehicles to carry a wide variety of payloads into space and return them safely. These successes have given Varda significant confidence to focus on increasing the system’s launch rate. “For our pharmaceutical customers, the increased speed means we can more closely align with drug development timelines,” Varda said in a May 8 press release. “For our defense customers, it enables faster iteration between tests. For microgravity researchers, we can offer a faster turnaround time between designing an experiment and acquiring data for iteration,” the statement said, emphasizing the added value that Varda’s technology brings to research and development processes across industries. This latest achievement from Varda Space Industries reaffirms both its potential in commercial space manufacturing and its unique contribution to critical defense research.
