https://www.notboring.co/p/varda-the-space-drug-factory
Welcome to the 234 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since last Thursday! If you haven’t subscribed, join 205,099 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
Today’s Not Boring is brought to you by… Create
If you feel as motivated as I do after reading about Varda, now might be the perfect time to go get in the best shape of your life and start doing big things. Create can help. Dan set out to reverse the creatine stigma, and in just a few months, thousands of people are using it and confirming what he knew from the research: it works.
Get 20% off your first order with the Not Boring link.
Hi friends 👋,
Happy Monday! Hope you had a refreshing weekend; now it’s time to talk about space factories.
Varda is one of the most ambitious companies I’ve ever come across. It’s a space company and a biotech company rolled into one, with a hypersonic testing service thrown in for good measure. Not Boring Capital is an investor in Varda, and I’ve been talking to Varda’s co-founders, Delian and Will, about writing a piece on the company for almost two years. We decided to wait until the perfect time: launch day.
This afternoon, Varda is going to launch a drug manufacturing factory into space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The factory will orbit the earth for a little over a month, running tests on the spacecraft and its drug manufacturing capabilities, and then come hurling back down into the Utah desert in mid-July.
Because Varda does both space and bio, I teamed up with Elliot Hershberg to tell its story. In addition to being our biotech partner, Elliot writes The Century of Biology. Little did he know when he started writing that the Century of Biology would play out both on the earth and above it.
I’ve told you that things were going to get really weird, and that the most interesting things were going to happen at the intersections. Varda is what I’m talking about.
Let’s get to it.
I was on a call with Varda co-founder and CEO Will Bruey the other day when, answering a question about how his company has been able to recruit so many SpaceX engineers, he said something that really helped put Varda in context:
“For all of us who’ve been at SpaceX for the past decade working on how to get up to space cheaply, once we did that, the question became: what do we do up there? Manufacturing was the obvious next step to a lot of us.”
No matter what happens next, where we currently stand in human history is marvelous in the original sense of the word. Going up to space is cheap! Manufacturing things in space is an obvious next step! What a time to be alive.
This afternoon, just 874 days into its existence, Varda will launch the world’s first commercial space factory into orbit. It’s the company’s first test flight en route to manufacturing drugs in space for use on earth, and a major milestone in humanity’s journey to expand our capabilities beyond our home planet.
Your browser can't play this video.