How microgravity could transform pharmaceuticals

Time Markers

00:00 – Episode introduction
00:27 – Welcome
00:44 – What does Varda do?
02:51 – A new ecosystem
04:03 – What can we produce in space?
05:52 – A viable market?
09:59 – Scaling up
13:08 – Hurdles
14:42 – Starship
17:18 – Dominoes falling
21:28 – Hypersonics
24:41 – 10 year cycle
25:59 – What’s the origin story?
29:09 – Next steps

Transcript – Will Bruey Conversation

David Ariosto – All right, we’ll just jump right into it. Will Bruey. CEO and co-founder at Varda Space Industries, which is a company that focuses on in space manufacturing as well as a host of other things. It’s, it’s great to have you on the pod.

Will Bruey – Hey, David, thanks for having me excited chat.

David Ariosto – Yeah. So let’s do a little bit of a primer here. Just walk me through a little bit what what Varda is, and what, maybe what var hopes to be as we kind of go through this maturation process with, with, you know, this new age and commercial space.

Will Bruey – Yeah, absolutely. Varda formulates drugs in microgravity, because the lack of gravity allows you to create new drug formulations that would otherwise be impossible on earth due to gravity. So when I say formulation, I mean like is the drug administered via an IV bag formulation or a shot formulation or a pill formulation, handleable formulation. So what we do is we develop formulations in space and then bring them back to the patient. And a lot of that is building the re entry vehicle that manufactures the the drugs, and then returns to the earth.

David Ariosto – And you, you’ve done this already. This is, this is not sort of on, on the, you know, the PowerPoint, or the, these are the pitch deck. This is, this has been accomplished, which is, I think this is kind of a, not only the fact that this is, this is in practical application now, but the fact that this is such a clear example of tapping into an existing market with technologies that actually might be better in space in some capacities. One of you can kind of expand on that a little bit.

Will Bruey – Yeah, exactly. I mean, you put it really well in the sense that this has been a business waiting to happen for decades. People have done microgravity research on crystallization, which is a big part of pharmaceutical formulation development, and how it’s different in microgravity for decades on the International Space Station. And there’s always an obvious business case here that just didn’t close because for two big reasons. First is launch cost. Of course, it wasn’t economical. But even more than cost, and which doesn’t get enough attention is cadence, and the fact that even the launch right now is certainly more expensive than FedEx shipping, the space is now just shipping in the sense of it’s a reliable, deterministic flight, whereas that just didn’t exist before Falcon 9 and…

David Ariosto – Let me stop you right there, before we kind of get onto the broader nature of this, and, like the technology and all all these, these other fascinating facets, I almost kind of want to take a quick step back in here, in the sense that, like the nature of what our generation and future generations will take for granted, in regard to how it used to be, just by just even the purview, the fact that, like, Space Launch used to be the purview of nation states, right? Just like millions upon millions of dollars, and that’s so fundamentally different now. And like, sort of the emergence of this, these new ecosystems, is, I don’t know, it’s just kind of like this new factory Florida, in a way, in low Earth orbit and elsewhere.

Will Bruey – Yeah, absolutely. You know, the previous generation thought of launches, like you said, a national effort. It was like Christopher Columbus going to New World, was the analogy. But, you know, the and the next generation. So, you know, our kids will be thinking about space more like the ocean, where it’s just this big, vast thing that’s actually pretty close by, and we’re stuck in between right now, in the transitional period.

David Ariosto – So space itself, like, offers these, sort of, this sort of unique domain, in terms of how, sort of the lattice structure works, in terms of, you know, the development of cells. And, you know, I wonder if you can kind of explain a little bit why it’s it’s a better suited environment for pharmaceuticals, because this is, like, I’ve talked to a number of people, and pharmaceuticals is one of these things that always comes up. It’s in situ manufacturing, it’s orbital services, it’s de orbiting, to some extent, it’s, you know, data centers, but it almost always kind of goes back to, you know, what can we produce in space that has a market on earth that you can kind of tap into? And drugs always come to the forefront, and Vards is clear at the vanguard of thst.

Will Bruey – Yeah. Thank you, yeah. The way I think about it is a gravity is a fundamental force of physics. There’s only four fundamental forces, and you learn that in high school, and gravity, being one of them, is fixed at 1g on Earth, whereas it goes to microgravity when you’re in orbit. And the only way to get to microgravity is to go to orbit. And so the key thing to understand here is that the way we think about gravity is like a knob, like a parameter that you can change during the formulation process or during the manufacturing process, in the same way that you might change temperature during a manufacturing process to create a different outcome so far, to wants to introduce a gravity knob to the pharmaceutical industry for them to turn to create new formulations in the same way that the refrigeration industry introduced a temperature knob last century. So, you know, cold doesn’t necessarily make drugs better, per se, and neither does microgravity.

It’s simply, you know, one of the invalid questions I’ll get a lot is like, Oh, how does microgravity make drugs better? And it’s like, well, it doesn’t necessarily, it’s just a knob, just like a temperature knob, but we’re introducing that knob to be used to create new drug formulations, like changing a formulation from an IV bag to a subcutaneous shot for better patient experience.

David Ariosto – Right? But there’s also these hurdles along the way in terms of just, you know, not only the cost of launch, but radiation exposure, and just sort of the very nature of, just like the sheer rattle of how these things kind of operate on their way in the orbiting and so, like, you’ve clearly kind of worked out the math in a way that I don’t even necessarily mean from an engineering perspective, but from dollars and cents question mark, this walk me through how this is a viable market.

Will Bruey – Yeah. So the what we do is we’re only creating the active ingredients in our re entry capsule, so most of the drugs that you will take will have either sugar inside or other excipient or saline solution. In the case of a shot or an IV bag, we’re not shipping those to space and back. We’re only shipping the active ingredients to space and back. And so, from first principles, microgravity gives you a way to create new chemical outcomes that you couldn’t create on earth. And the the most valuable chemicals on Earth with that also have a large market are pharmaceuticals, and so that’s why it’s a clear first use case for many microgravity manufacturing. What we do is we, you can kind of think of the I got asked a interesting question. Like, you know, because I get this this question a lot like, explain how this works as a business. And I got asked a question by an investor the other day that really helped me figure out how to articulate this way.

They, he asked, well, what’s the what’s the most confusing part about Varda for folks to wrap their heads around? And I thought about it for a second, and actually, it’s actually it’s the space aspect so, and because it throws you for a loop, like, if we just had a zero gravity oven in the back of the lab. Said, Hey, we have this oven that can do chemistry that no other oven can do, you know? And then we say, Hey, we’re just a typical formulation development company, right? Biotech company. I don’t think I would be on this podcast, or many other podcasts, just too simple. You know, not interesting enough. But that’s really what we are. And so right now we’ve, we’re increasing the cadence of our microgravity oven in the, you know, in the back of the lab. Pay no attention to the to the rocket behind the curtain kind of thing. And so in that analogy, it really kind of helps understand what the business looks like. Business looks like. Because right now, you know, this year, we’re only running our microgravity oven four times a year, and it costs a few million bucks to run. And you know, next year, we want to bring those costs down and increase those that cadence, and while keeping in balance the demand for the oven and the supply of how many often we run that oven, and keeping those two things in balance so that we’re a healthy business as we as we grow over the next decade.

And so the way the business works is, well, you might put something you might use your zero gravity oven in the back of the lab for different use cases this year than you will in five years, because it’ll be a lower cost and higher cadence then than it is today. So what we’re using it for today is really laying the foundation of determining which drugs we will make at scale, creating patent protections around them and and learning, and also selling those learnings to our pharmaceutical partners. And so then, you know, a few years go by now, our microgravity oven is less expensive to run and we can run it more often, and that’ll change the answer of, okay, now we might use it for scaling up actual doses for clinical trials. And, you know, a couple years after that, now we have enough cadence to actually hit the market and that sort of thing. So the drug development cycle is, you know, it takes, on average, about 10 years for a drug to go from molecule to, you know, FDA approved and in someone’s body, and that is a whole decade, is plenty of time to scale up spacecraft production and cadence.

David Ariosto – It is. Part of the scaling up is not necessarily incumbent on you as a company, though. I mean, I kind of foresee it to some extent, some degree of bottlenecks that exist in terms of existing launch infrastructure. This is something that SpaceX, you know, your sort of former employer, has talked about quite a bit, as well as others within launch sectors. So like it, I wonder, in the context of this, like rapid growth, this convergence of technologies, there still has to be sort of a pairing with with the federal government. Federal government here in terms of existing infrastructures, whether it’s Cape Canaveral, or, you know, any number of the facilities Vandenberg or, you know, down in Texas, like, part of these things don’t necessarily work without taxpayer buying. Is that, is that sort of a fair, fair statement?

Will Bruey – Yes and no.

David Ariosto – So maybe not work, but like, the scale of it, of it doesn’t, doesn’t get to where it potentially could get to.

Will Bruey – Yeah, I think, I think there is certain so I’ll zoom out for a sec there. The point you made about a lot needs to change for, for, a space enabled or a microgravity enabled formulation to get into a human body years from now, that’s that’s very true, not for even things like, for example, the FDA will require for life saving drugs for you to have a plan for redundancy in your supply chain, right? That’s hard to do if we’re the only space manufacturers. Think about that. Yeah, yeah. So there’s a ton of small things like that that need to reorient or be or be addressed in order for mass production of microgravity enabled drug formulations in the near term, though, I’m actually, I’m not too concerned about the I’m I’m not too concerned about the ability to launch vehicles and in the near term, but I do agree with you that, you know, I see in a few years, there could be a capacity issue it.

But, you know, Starship, you know, had a successful launch yesterday, talking about, yeah, so I think that’ll help fill the gap. And the reason I say that is because, ultimately, you know, the mission of SpaceX is to go to Mars. And I think Starlink, you know, if I had a gun to my head, I think the most valid rationale for Starlink existence, other than, you know, ubiquitous, global internet, is cool in and of itself, and certainly a worthwhile endeavor, but it is also a a response to the lack of elasticity in the launch market that did not respond to reusable rockets. And so Varda is really kind of the first true elastic response to reusable rockets that I can think of where you know, on average, every day, or per day, there’s three Starlink satellites launched, if we’re launching three of our microgravity bioreactors and reentering them, three per day, Varda is doing real well. And so the bar…

David Ariosto – …is doing real well. I just wonder, in the context that, like, you know, let’s say, down the road, you know, you’re doing some sort of ground. breaking pharmaceutical development in orbit, you come up with some, some sort of, you know, cancer solving drug, and then everybody on earth wants it. And then you now, you’re dealing with supply chain issues and questions of just sort of over demand, and the nature of, like, how that actually kind of manifests, both within, like, the commercial capacity to meet those demands, but also, like what you mentioned, you know, the regulatory aspects and the demands for redundancies and all of these things, so kind of, it kind of opens up this vast amount of possibilities, but also some some potential, like hurdles that you’re going to have to figure out a way to overcome.

Will Bruey – Yeah, I think if we have the problem of engineering more cadence in order to cure cancer, I think we’ve already won at that point. It is funny in the sense that I think that the biggest barriers, or the most uncertain barriers to microgravity enabled drug formulations are not the actual engineering, the spacecraft engineering aspect. I think that, you know, if we line up a train of re entry vehicles primed with a life saving drug, drug, pharmaceutical, to Vandenberg or to the Cape and, you know, say, hey, you know, we’re, we’re ready with more demand for launch, I would, or, you know, maybe the Brownsville or whatever. I would be shocked if, if the supply, the launch supply chain, did not respond. You know, as my former it’s fair, it’s a good kick into gear pretty quick.

David Ariosto – Good problem to have. I mean, speak about the engineering, I want to, just like, take a moment to sort of acknowledge what has happened with Starship because, I mean, you did spend five years of your career at SpaceX, and just, you know, it’s interesting to me to kind of like you. I talked to different people in the space industry, and so many of them have kind of, like been burned the burnished their chops, either at NASA or SpaceX, and they kind of just, you know, kind of put in their time, sort of learn the ropes. And some of these either legacy, I mean, it’s funny to me even call SpaceX and legacy place, because it’s certainly not been around for, you know, two plus decades. But, you know, there’s, like, it’s almost seems like it’s almost seems like there’s a training ground in some, some of these places that then sort of, you know, spin off into to other companies. And that seems to be what, you know, what happened with you and, and, I mean, clearly Starship was, was is a manifestation of that company. So just curious to kind of get your, get your thoughts about all that.

Will Bruey – Yeah. So the two, two things first is, you know, with any vanguard of an industry, you’ll see kind of spinoffs, like, you know, I remember visiting Detroit, and, you know, at Ford Motors, you see some of the, some of the original folks that were there, like, Chrysler was there, right? And so, you know, there’s nothing, so, nothing new there. And the way I think about Starship is, you know, the way we at Varda think about launch is, is shipping, right? And, and I’ll explain why that’s so fundamentally awesome in a second. But when Starship comes online, or when more launch providers come online to help create pricing pressure for lower costs, to me, that doesn’t really change the game fundamentally, it just means better, more reliable, lower cost shipping. So you know when, when Starship launches, it’s like, Oh, sweet. That’s a new semi truck from from FedEx. Yeah, you know it’s, it’s awesome. Don’t get me wrong. It helps our business model. It helps our margins, but it doesn’t like change. You know how Varda thinks per se, or how a business would think just because there’s a new semi truck model coming out of FedEx So, but the reason why that’s so fundamentally awesome is because here’s a series of dominoes that I think we’re igniting at Varda. So first, bring home a small, economical re entry vehicle, right? There’s only two flying commercial reentry vehicles today, Dragon and varsa is capsule.

David Ariosto – This isn’t something I was going to talk to you about, because I’m guessing where you’re going is hypersonics. But until the multi case use of how your business is operating.

Will Bruey – I’m excited to talk about that too, but no, so I’ll go through these dominoes really quickly. But I think this is actually the most exciting part. So one is have a cheap re entry vehicle that’s made for in and out of an objects we’re creating microgravity. Manufacturing is economical, all right, that domino has fallen. What happens next? Next is with our first drug, we will create perpetual demand for launch. And why this is fundamentally interesting is because, right now, every other satellite provider, their demand for launch eventually saturates when their constellation is populated. Right? Constellation is populated right? Either Earth observation or even Starlink will eventually saturate the internet. And in case which, when do you, what do you rationalize continued launch with? But for Varda, since we’re making actual consumable goods, we have to continue launching.

Our constellation never populates, so we create a perpetual demand for launch, and then the next domino to fall is actually a positive feedback loop on perpetual demand for launch, because right now, there’s only certain amount of drugs that we can make in micro gravity because of the unit economics, but in servicing the first few drugs that we can and creating that perpetual demand for launch, we get economies of scale, which helps. Lower our threshold of dollar per kilogram where a drug makes sense. So finally, you get the more drugs you make, means the more drugs you can make. And that that is a positive feedback loop that drives launch costs down and cadence up, and the number of drugs we can make up. So now you’ve got a perpetual demand with a positive feedback loop that’s causing more and more cadence. And then finally, and this is where it gets really exciting. So if you’re if you understand those two, don understand those two dominoes now, you know, stepping aside for a second and thinking about a traditional cdmo or contract manufacturing organization in the pharmaceutical industry that where, where drugs are manufactured, you go in there, there’s people on the factory floor. It’s not a hunt, it’s not a lights out manufacturing operation, right? So there are people moving things from one station to another, you know, checking on the equipment. And the reason why there are still humans in in in a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant, and most pharmaceutical manufacturing plants, is because there’s a threshold where it actually makes it’s cheaper to hire a human than to build some sort of robot or automated system beyond that, right? So what’s very cool is, as this positive feedback loop pushes our dollar per kilogram low to that threshold, then you truly think about space as just Milwaukee, you know, it’s just another place. And so there’s no…

David Ariosto – …space is Milwaukee, I wonder, though. I mean, will that, Will that continue on? You know, because there are, there are sunk costs associated with sort of robotics and the development of AI and sort of the nature of human workforces, and like, where they they fit into the broader loop. I mean, what you’re saying that might be true today. I, you know, I wonder what, what, what this looks like 5, 10, 15 years from now, as we like, look at a mature industry. You look at sort of reduction of launch costs. You look at more companies trying to, kind of like, you know, make their make their hay within, within that market. And then looking at sort of those, fixed costs, those recurring costs, that might be a labor force from this, in terms of all the everything else. And this is not a question necessarily for space or for Varda, really, but exactly yes, I think it’s a question for all of us.

Will Bruey – You know, you said it perfectly. Is that is, if not, a space question like, as as our launch costs go down and our cadences go up, you know, space becomes Milwaukee, you know, is just another place. And now, so the only difference between space and here will be the costs to get there. And so as those, as those costs become in family with the cost to get anywhere else, you know, we will be susceptible, you know, in the space industry to the automation that will happen in any manufacturing plant. But it’s not unique to space at that point.

David Ariosto – Well, also maybe just the radiation and the lack of oxygen up there.

Will Bruey – True. But, I mean, if it’s not that expensive to take up some scuba gear, you know? I mean, I’m downplaying it, certainly to some extent. But the reason why those sorts of things are expensive is because you don’t have economies of scale yet. But there’s nothing. There’s no like, flux capacitor, or like, if you think about the equipment that’s being shipped up, there’s no first principles cost that’s prohibitive. It’s just the fact that the numbers are too low to take advantage of scale.

David Ariosto – I think this isthat this is one of my fascinating things, because we started this conversation talking about, sort of the legacy of the nature of the industry being the purview of nation states. And, you know, for so long, space had been dominated by the by the realms of engineers and physicists and those who kind of like focus specifically on the engineering aspects of this now and now, you have the heads of several major space companies that have software backgrounds. You have more MBAs that are involved in this. They’re making, you know, comments like, like, I’d seem to dovetail more with ROI in terms of the nature of what, what they’re building. It’s not necessarily, can you build it? It’s like, can we build this in a way that’s sustainable, that creates market, or that taps into existing markets, which I think is, is, you know, a big part of what Bart is, business model is the other side of this, though, is that, you know, in this, you know, newfangled commercial sector, you have multiple, multiple use cases. And so it’s, it’s, if you have this re entry vehicle and you’re bringing back pharmaceuticals that that are potentially heading to market, why not use that vehicle for something else upon re entry? And this is where the conversation goes to hypersonics. I wonder if you can kind of, like, kind of tell us a little bit more about like, where Varda fits into that.

Will Bruey – Yeah, so Varda is re entry vehicle is the cheapest way to go from space to earth, by far. And it’s not human rated that because of that human rated Exactly. It’s small. It’s not human rated. It fits into a rideshare envelope. And the reason we built it that way is for the unit economics of manufacturing, pharmaceuticals in orbit. Turns out, the you know, if you build something, that’s the cheapest way to go from space to Earth, it’s also the cheapest way to go Mach 25 because that’s the speed at which a re entry vehicle will hit the atmosphere. So, you know, the cheapest way to go, Mach 25 10 years ago, was by a dedicated launch, right? So the business model for Varda, I call it delta V arbitrage. Since you mentioned MBA, maybe I’ll be able to get away with this terminology. But we’re basically there’s an Arb(itage) between for speed from Falcon 9 or a rideshare launch in general.

And so, you know, it’s similar, if I went over to the Air Force and said, hey, I can get you to Mach 25 without a rocket. You know, they look at each other like, Okay, this guy’s insane. But what I’m doing right is, you know, what we’re doing in Varda is, is we’re buying ride share costs and and then once we’re in orbit, when we hit the atmosphere, we’re going that fast. So basically, long story short, is the cheapest way to go Mach 25 today is to go to space first, and then you’re already high up and going fast, and then come back, rather than just go straight to Mach 25.

David Ariosto – I don’t think most people realize how fast Mach 25 is. So, so hypersonics are defined as anything that goes faster than Mach Five, and then we’re talking about five times the speed of just the baseline of what hypersonics is. So like the operational sort of nature, of how fast these things are going, those potential military applications and other potential applications. I mean, it just, it just strikes me like we’re kind of at the vanguard of this whole brand new era in terms of how we travel, how we communicate. And, you know, companies like Varda are seem to be, you know, in the mix in a way that, you know, just starting to kind of get started. But I wonder, when we talk about pharmaceuticals, when, I mean, when can I, when can I buy a something, you know, at a pharmacy, that it’s actually, I mean, when does it hit market, right? Like that. I think that’s the question, because that, that is the moment, right? I mean, we, you’ve proven this. It’s possible. It’s no longer, it’s off the, you know, the pitch room floor. It’s your operational you have vehicles. When? When do you start, in terms of your business case? When does this start to hit the market?

Will Bruey – So I think that Varda will not be the long pole in the schedule, if you will, in the next few years, and then it’ll just be the same answer as it is for today, where it’s a it takes 10 years to go from drug molecule to the market. Yes, we do micro gravity manufacturing in that part of that process, but that part is not the driving part of the schedule, if you will. So you know, and we want to start doing reformulations of current drugs now, which means that’s a fast, that’s more expedited approval process. Because if you already know the drug molecule is safe and the and effective, then changing the formulation is a lower lift. And so, long story short, you know, we’re looking for having that occur at least into the clinic by the end of the decade.

David Ariosto – Okay, all right, what was the origin story in all this? This is, like, this is kind of the, there’s an aha moment, and all these things that, you know, the sort of confluence of meeting of the minds and people come together say, Well, we could do this. But I’m curious, you know, with with your background and, like, where, where pharmaceuticals came into play here was it just sort of like you were looking at the different pillars of existing market and saying, like, we can, we can corner this one?

Will Bruey – Yeah. So let’s see. It’s, it’s, you know, a tale as old as time, science meets economics. Economics falls in love with science and the idea of microgravity manufacturing because of that science that was demonstrated, you know, for decades. So that’s really the origin of it. And then deli and my co founder, who works at Founders Fund, they were the first outside capital into SpaceX. So he’s been tracking reusable rockets for quite some time, and when they became repeatable, it was just obvious that microgravity manufacturing now pencils out as a positive unit economics case. And so back actually, very…

David Ariosto – …purely, sort of a look at the numbers, the business case. And just, you know…

Will Bruey – …it was a look at the, yeah, he was looking at the right numbers at the right time, and came up with the idea. Called me up, actually, exactly five years and one day ago, we just had our co founder anniversary yesterday, you know, base, yeah, basically was, hey, you know, I think manufacturing and space makes sense now. What should we do? And so, you know, it was as simple like there. The the logic is, is very simple behind pharmaceuticals. And, you know, I kind of said it earlier, but the from first principles, we have a unique way to manipulate chemical systems in microgravity. Great. Which chemical systems? Well, the most valuable per unit kilogram that also have a large market are pharmaceuticals, and they also have a huge positive impact on people’s lives. It’s like, all right, this is a match made in heaven. No pun intended.

David Ariosto – Yeah, and this, that’s a good one. That’s nice. You did you just, just, just go up with that derailed me in terms of my next question, due to that, that bit there. But I, I wonder, though, like your business, tends to center on Earth’s orbits, right? Everything that’s kind of happening in ads, you know, in situ, manufacturing and pharmaceuticals and reentry, hypersonics and all these things, when that becomes more developed, if and when that becomes more developed, do you see this as sort of like, sort of a baseline for sort of this leapfrog approach, where you start to develop, you know, low earth orbit, Middle Earth orbit, geosynchronous in more profound ways, then cislunar space becomes more of a question than a services market, you know, like this, this gradual expansion out in terms of both technical capabilities, existing markets, which I think is a real question, and. Then, you know, the the capacity to kind of execute on both of those.

Will Bruey – Yeah, the so this is a great question in the sense that it kind of picks up with that, that domino analogy I was making earlier, like the next step of it, of course, is when, when it is as, as, as cheap to go to space, it is, it is to go to anywhere else, there will be a time when it does make more sense to have a human on on a manufacturing station, just because it’s cheaper to put the human there than design more complex automation for the nitty gritty, just like there is in a manufacturing warehouse today. And so what’s really cool is, you know, in about 10 years. And it’s very much a when, not an if, when the unit economics work like capitalism, hopefully Varda is the winner and is the first there. But if it’s not Varda, you know, capitalism will this, will this will happen. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s the cat’s out of the bag. But anyway, you know, 10 years from now, hopefully it’s a varda employee that will go up…

David Ariosto – …stamp their punch card on the lunar service as they get to work on a fab on the flight there.

Will Bruey – In order to get to lunar I think we got to get to Leo first. And what I mean by that is like we’re only there for the micro gravity, so Leo Geo, it doesn’t matter to us. We just want to be the in free fall. So, but what is cool is, you’re right that, you know, there will be a punch card moment where we send an employee up, they’re there for about a month. You know, very similar to an oil rig. You go there for a month, you come home. But what’s fascinating is that we will hit this threshold where, you know, Joe Schmo, who goes up there for a month and comes back down will have created more value than it cost for his round trip, right? And it’s that moment that the invisible hand of the free market lifts us off our home planet, because it’s literally more expensive to keep him here or her here than to ship them up and back to make the money in the microgravity drug factory. And it’s at that moment where, you know, human activity is, is cheaper in space than not. And then that’s when, okay, now cislunar starts to now, you know, the I kid around like, when that moment happens, you know, the next person who pitches a cislunar idea will sound only as crazy as BARDA sounded five years ago, and so, and then, and then we’ll, you know, we’ll take the next step into the cosmos.

David Ariosto – The development of Varda roughnecks in space.

Will Bruey – I love that.

David Ariosto – It’s an interesting construct. Well, I really appreciate you spending the time with with us here at Space Minds. The CEO and co-founder of Varda Space, and you’re up to some very, very interesting, things. Thanks for joining us.

Will Bruey – Thanks for having me, David. Hope to talk to you again soon.