WASHINGTON — Varda Space Industries said Nov. 28 that its fifth mission, W-5, reached orbit after a launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-15 rideshare.
Transporter-15 lifted off at 1:44 p.m. Eastern carrying 140 small satellites. W-5 was among them, becoming the latest in Varda’s effort to build “space factories” that use microgravity to manufacture materials in orbit then bring them back to Earth. The El Segundo-based startup is looking to manufacture high-value products that benefit from the absence of gravity, especially pharmaceuticals that crystallize more cleanly in space.
W-5 is the newest spacecraft in the company’s “W-Series” of free-flying reentry vehicles designed to orbit Earth, conduct on-orbit processing and return space-made materials. With W-5 now in orbit, Varda is operating two W-Series vehicles in space for the first time. W-4 launched in June.
The mission carries a U.S. government payload funded through the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Prometheus program, aimed at testing hypersonic survivability and materials performance. AFRL uses commercial reentry systems like Varda’s to expose components, sensors and prototype materials to the intense thermal and mechanical loads encountered at hypersonic speeds. Varda’s capsule hits the atmosphere at about 18,000 miles per hour, exceeding Mach 25 before descending under parachute.
Details of W-5’s government experiment were not disclosed. Varda previously flew AFRL-funded tests on its W-2 and W-3 missions.
“With W-5, AFRL and Varda again demonstrated that hypersonic flight testing can be done routinely and affordably,” said Brandi Sippel, vice president of mission management at Varda Space Industries.
The W-5 vehicle includes three components: the hypersonic reentry capsule; a satellite bus that provides power, navigation and propulsion, and an ablative C-PICA heatshield that protects the spacecraft during peak heating. The vehicles are produced at Varda’s El Segundo facility.
AFRL awarded Varda a multi-year Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity contract that secures access to reentry flights through at least 2028. Under the IDIQ, AFRL can task Varda with flying experimental payloads, collecting reentry data and returning hardware for analysis, effectively treating the commercial capsules as a repeatable hypersonic test range.Commercial reentry vehicles like Varda’s offer a way to increase test cadence without major infrastructure investments.
