Varda Space Industries has deployed its third orbital capsule which carries a hypersonic tech for the United States. The W-3 capsule flew to space aboard a Rocket Lab Pioneer satellite platform.
This was launched to orbit by SpaceX’s Transporter-13 rideshare mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The mission, W-3, is its second of the year. W-2 successfully touched down in Australia in February. Both of these were designed to test instruments under extreme reentry speeds.
Varda Space aims to make in-space testing a routine practice. It is also looking to deploy ‘space factories’ that manufacture materials faster under microgravity conditions.
A Mach 25 reentry test
While W-3 is reentering Earth’s atmosphere, it will test a specialized payload. W-3 is carrying an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) engineered by the US Air Force in collaboration with Innovative Scientific Solutions Incorporated (ISSI).
IMUs are incredibly precise electronic systems that track motion, orientation, and speed. Today, most smartphones feature IMUs. However, the new system aboard W-3 is specially designed to operate at extremely high speeds.
During reentry, Varda’s capsule will reach hypersonic speeds higher than Mach 25. After a short mission of only a few weeks, it will reenter and land at the Koonibba Test Range in South Australia, managed by Southern Launch.
“The need for robust, plug-and-play IMU technology is a growing capability area that will significantly advance the current state-of-the-art for domain awareness and control of future systems,” Dr. Steve NeVille, senior scientist at ISSI, explained in a press statement.
“The W-3 reentry flight test with Varda provides an exciting and unique proto-qualification platform to rapidly advance our IMU technology readiness level in a relevant reentry environment, which is the pinnacle of early development testing,” he continued.
The payload aboard W-3 is part of the Prometheus program, an Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) initiative in collaboration with Varda.
The program’s goal is to accelerate the development of hypersonic and reentry technologies. It will do so by using cost-effective test platforms and deploying them at a high cadence, allowing engineers on the ground to collect a wealth of data.
“High-cadence, routine operations is our goal. We are working to make reentry as commonplace as launch,” said Varda Vice President for Mission Management, Brandi Sippel. “We are looking forward to the day when sending capsules into orbit and back to Earth is seen as routine.”
Varda was founded by ex-SpaceX avionics engineer Will Bruey and Delian Asparouhov of Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. The company’s first mission, W-1, took flight in June 2023. According to the private space firm, W-1 was the “world’s first space factory”.
“From more powerful fiber optic cables to new, life-saving pharmaceuticals, there is a world of products used on Earth today that can only be manufactured in space,” Varda Space explains on its website.
