One more big test remains for Varda's first-of-its-kind "space factory."

Maybe only tangentially related to SpaceX, but an amazing sign of the space revolution yet to come — thanks in large part to SpaceX for lowering the cost to get to orbit.

About the re-entry vehicle: "…we’re building like 1986 Toyota Corolla that is meant to be less than a million bucks a pop, quickly refurbished, and then shot right back into space.” How cool!

  • cxtinac@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    That’s great, but one part I don’t understand is the compelling advantage of growing drug crystals (from the article) in micro-g. I get that maybe they are larger & maybe fewer defects (?) but why is that important for this application?

    • snota@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      My laymen’s thought is that Chrystal growth requires nucleation points in the solution to start it off. In uG I guess the impurities required for the nucleation would be more evenly distributed and it means that as the crystals grow they would be more uniform. Having said that, I expect they just crush it all up in to a powder anyway so maybe that’s not the case.

    • burble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      Crystal growth in space is like the go-to experiment. Basically every early station and Shuttle did crystal growth. Like, the Salyuts and Skylab did crystal growth. No one has made a viable business case out of it yet. I think Varda wanted a cool sounding proof of concept to get more VC money. Who knows if they can close the business case with something like this, but I’m glad they extracted money from rich people to do cool stuff in space and develop some new technology. Their capsule is pretty neat.