Space Systems Design Studio alum creates a gravity-off switch in orbit

By Diane Tessaglia-Hymes

In this artist’s rendering of the launch booked for April 2023, Varda Space Industrie’s capsule is departing from its manufacturing satellite, and heading back to Earth.
In this artist’s rendering of the launch booked for April 2023, Varda Space Industries' capsule is departing from its manufacturing satellite, and heading back to Earth.

There’s a new star in the aerospace industry and it’s bringing a gravity-off switch to manufacturing. Varda Space Industries, co-founded and led by a Cornell Engineering alum, is sending satellites to space, where products used on Earth can be created in a zero-gravity, dust-free environment. “We’re a microgravity platform for any type of manufacturing,” explains Will Bruey ’11, M.Eng. ’12, CEO of Varda Space Industries, a company he founded in 2020 with Delian Asparouhov, and has since garnered more than $53 million in startup capital.

Will Bruey, AEP ’11, M.Eng. ’12, CEO and co-founder of Varda Space Industries.
Will Bruey ’11, M.Eng. ’12, CEO and co-founder of Varda Space Industries.

Space manufacturing has been around for decades, dating back to 1969 when Russian cosmonauts determined that the environment of space “may solve many welding problems.” Starting in the 1970s, space manufacturing took the form of experimental attempts done primarily at Skylab2, and later at Spacelab and the International Space Station. Only recently has the cost to go to space fallen to a point where it can now be economical to commercially produce some products in space. This is in part due to reusable rockets that have lowered the cost of access to space and opened up a range of in-space activities. “After our satellites separate from the rocket, they perform operations such as mixing or heating chemicals,” Bruey explains, “and then, after those operations are complete, we do a deorbit burn to send small capsules back to Earth with the materials produced. Our capsules—about 1 meter in diameter—survive re-entry, deploy parachutes, and land with the manufactured contents that we then deliver to our customers.

Making Materials in Microgravity

One such set of products serves the pharmaceutical industry: drugs formulated using microgravity. “The ideal application for our capsules is manufacturing high-value chemicals in space,” says Bruey. “There are a lot of things we can do in space to create value for chemists on Earth, for example, drug molecules crystallize differently in microgravity than they do here on Earth. This can improve parameters of high interest, such as solubility. The reason we manufacture in space is because of the unique way microgravity influences chemistry.”

Kris Gonzalez DeWhitt examines terrestrial versions of the chemistry Varda plans to do in orbit.
Kris Gonzalez DeWhitt examines terrestrial versions of the chemistry Varda plans to do in orbit.

Crystal growth behavior—both morphology and growth rate—are different in microgravity than an equivalent setup experiencing the Earth’s gravity. This is partly because as crystals grow they release heat, and that heat causes convective currents in the solution. A growing crystal that sinks due to its own weight would also create convective currents from its sinking motion. In microgravity, there is less of this convective transport. As a result, crystals grow differently, creating different geometric lattice shapes as their molecules fit and stack together in a repeating sequence. This can also create unique ratios between their morphologies as well. “This is important because the morphology of a crystal defines many of its macroscopic properties,” Bruey says. “In the pharmaceutical world, solubility, or how fast the drug dissolves in the body, is a particularly important property. Space manufacturing in microgravity allows us to alter the outcome of crystal growth to influence properties like solubility.”

But the applications don’t stop at medicine. The International Space Station has hosted countless experiments using the unique environment of microgravity to produce unique results. Things like fiber optics, silicon wafers, and special metal alloys all have unique benefits from being fabricated in microgravity. And since gravity is a fundamental force of physics, Varda’s platform can be useful across all disciplines of engineering.

An Industrial Park in Space

Varda employees integrate one of Varda’s first spacecraft.
Varda employees integrate one of Varda’s first spacecraft.

In the long term, Bruey wants Varda to build the first off-planet industrial park at-scale. Now that rockets are reusable and the costs have dropped accordingly, there are no significant technical or economic barriers to this goal. “We’re not really a typical aerospace company,” he says, “because our customers don’t care that we’re going to space. They only care that we can turn off gravity for them.” For Varda, that means manufacturing mostly small things like expensive chemicals or small products in the short-term as the space industry continues to grow. But as launch costs continue to drop, Bruey hopes to scale up both the range of products Varda creates as well as the size of each. Right now, the telecom and remote sensing industries are the primary users of space commercially. Varda wants to be at the forefront of the next innovation, which they’re predicting will be the first off-planet industrial park. Bruey envisions a distributed industrial park, rather than a single large “station.” Bruey envisions a set of robotic production satellites orbiting Earth, with each satellite creating a different product: drug molecules, fiber optics, etcetera.

“We can bring the raw materials to those production satellites with our Varda spacecraft, and bring back finished products with our reentry capsules.” Bruey adds: “It’s hard to say what’s next in any industry, because it’s all speculation, but I think what we can say about Varda’s future is that it has a very real chance of benefiting people on Earth in ways that simply can’t be done any other way. If successful, we’ll end up inciting a positive feedback loop to drive human activity in space.” By manufacturing those first few products, Bruey hopes he can drive demand for launches, setting that positive feedback loop in motion to decrease launch costs and increase the economical products Varda can offer.

Roots in MAE's Space Systems Design Studio

Cornell Engineering is renowned for its multidisciplinary faculty, students, and alumni, and Bruey is no exception. As an applied and engineering physics undergraduate who also received an M.Eng. in systems engineering, much of Bruey’s time at Cornell was spent in the Space Systems Design Studio directed by Mason Peck, the Stephen J. Fujikawa ’77 Professor of Astronautical Engineering in the Sibley School. It was there that Bruey worked on his first space project, the Violet Satellite, a first-of-its-kind nanosatellite that launched into space in 2012.

Wendy Shimata
Wendy Shimata ’09, is the Director of Autonomous Systems at Varda Space Industries.

“I was really having fun when I was designing two parts of the space program,” said Bruey, who was the project’s attitude and control subsystem lead. “I built a charge-discharge simulation to determine battery life as a function of spacecraft attitude and position throughout its life in space. I also built an algorithm for detumbling the spacecraft using our magnetic torque rods.”

Another alum of the Space Systems Design Studio is Wendy Shimata ’09. At Cornell, most of Shimata’s electives were space-oriented: control theory, aerospace, and GPS. She was also part of Professor Peck’s project team for the CUsat Satellite, a nanosatellite designed to help calibrate global positioning systems with pinpoint accuracy. The satellite launched into orbit in 2013.

“I loved building out the first concept of what mission operations would look like to fly our vehicle, which marries all aspects of hardware and software together,” said Shimata, who served on the project’s attitude control subsystem team before becoming its mission operations and software lead. It was that experience that taught her valuable lessons in design, and how to address challenges along the way. “There were many late nights and weekends of realizing things like the hardware was out of spec, performance was not what we thought, the schedule didn’t close, and we had to find engineering solutions to each of those things,” Shimata said.

After Cornell, Shimata worked at Boeing in the guidance, navigation, and controls department for about seven years, and then accepted a job at SpaceX in the software department, eventually leading the Dragon Software team. That’s where she met Bruey, and the two worked together in mission control. After founding Varda, Bruey reached out to his fellow applied and engineering physics alum to bring her on the team. Now, the two are using their Cornell education to operate one of the most innovative new aerospace companies in the industry.

“The question is, how can we be creative and innovative, because that’s what really drives our industry and pushes it to new heights,” said Shimata. “Cornell taught me to think about and understand almost any engineering problem, and it gave me a great toolbox of skills to do exactly that in my career.”