Varda Space Industries

"Space drugs have gone from research for science's sake to research and development for patients' sake." Hear the rest of Varda CEO Will Bruey’s thoughts on the orbital economy and listen to the rest of the episode at SpaceNews https://lnkd.in/evJ8i5Qe  

Varda is actively hiring for these mission-critical roles. Apply now at https://lnkd.in/gnddpFqE

Reentry may start in orbit, but it ends in the dirt. Come get your hands dirty at Varda. We're hiring: varda.com/careers

Varda had a great time at the annual Aerospace Games this year. If points were awarded based on amount of fun had and number of spacecraft flown, we would have taken home a trophy, too.    We're hiring across propulsion, water balloon toss, structures, software, tug-of-war, and more. Join us. https://lnkd.in/gnddpFqE

Crew Behind the Capsule: Ami 🔥 From the payloads developed in our C-PICA-protected capsule to the satellite bus steering them home, thermal engineering is embedded in every step. As Varda’s Thermal Engineering Manager, Ami Bhavsar spends her time thinking through how to scale thermal design of our vehicle to meet the demands of defense and pharmaceutical payloads. It starts with a nebulous problem: the vehicle must survive every moment of a mission spanning the contrasting environments of cold, dark space to searing hot reentry, to ultimately deliver shelf stable pharmaceuticals. She says it’s like standing in a parking lot in New York City and only being allowed to pick one outfit for all 365 days of the year. Consider managing the swing from icy winters to the summer heat with only the options to stand still or jog in place to balance temperature. Thermal engineering is an energy balancing act, toeing power, packaging, and position. Ami has helped shape Varda’s vehicles from the inside out. She joined Varda in 2022 as a Thermofluids Analyst, supporting the reentry capsule and first pharmaceutical payload before taking on a big milestone: becoming the Thermal Responsible Engineer for Varda’s satellite bus, which we make here in El Segundo. From early architecture trades and detailed hardware design to flight operations and dispositioning data on console, the thermal RE role for the Varda bus underscores the highly cross-functional nature of thermal engineering. Today, Ami leads the thermal team as they scale in-house C-PICA heatshield production, support our external partners to fly novel materials, unlock new pharmaceutical processes, expand thermofluids capabilities, and mature in-house spacecraft capabilities. As Varda continues to grow, Ami is helping build the systems – and the team – that will empower the future of orbital manufacturing. Varda is hiring across teams. For more information, and the chance to work on complex problems with exceptional individuals, go to https://lnkd.in/gnddpFqE.

Meet Varda's Intern Class of 2022: Sam, Dylan, Rebecca, Tracy, Bruce, and Harrison all started as interns during Varda's early days and have grown in their careers along with the company. These six lead the build of key components, spanning software to hardware and mission assurance; pictured here with the very capsule they flew. Needless to say, they have helped build Varda into what it is today. We are hiring and are looking for people like these six to help build the next era of the space economy. Apply now at https://lnkd.in/gnddpFqE

This is what our team built. Then they launched it. Then it came back. Varda operates the world’s only commercial orbital manufacturing and reentry platform. We’ve flown six missions, and still have three more this year. We’re building the fleet now and we need more technicians and engineers to do it. Apply online at varda.com/careers

In 1984, a UAB biochemist named Charles Bugg sent lysozyme crystals to space. Lysozyme, a protein found in egg whites, has been a model system for crystallography for decades. Bugg was trying to see whether microgravity changed how proteins assembled into crystals. When he got the results back, it changed his perspective. The crystals that had come back from the space shuttle were much larger than anything he had grown in his terrestrial lab. The x-ray diffraction data was sharp enough to enhance structural resolution, to the point where it was enough to see binding sites and molecular geometry that he couldn't see with Earth-grown crystals. That result was due to the change in convection in space. On Earth, fluid around growing protein crystals doesn't stay still — the crystal is growing in a turbulent microenvironment due to our gravitational pull. The result is disordered crystals. By removing gravity, molecules can diffuse slowly and uniformly. Bugg published, others repeated it and over time, the science held through the repetition. What didn't hold was the access model. Over the next few decades, getting a payload to the ISS for crystallization work meant competing for crew time, and scheduling windows that could be 2-3 years (or more) out. Pharmaceutical companies can't build a manufacturing process on that cadence any more than it could build one on the result of a single benchtop experiment. 40 years after Charles Bugg, Varda flew Ritonavir, a drug with one of the most famous polymorph failures in history, on a mission specifically designed to demonstrate that microgravity crystallization was now a production capability. And the rest is history. Learn more at varda.com/biopharma

We're #hiring a new Laboratory Operations Technician in El Segundo, California. Apply today or share this post with your network.