Varda Space Industries can finally celebrate this. For almost eight months, the space manufacturer’s first mission was essentially stuck in low-Earth orbit, but it wasn’t due to technical failures or limitations imposed by the laws of physics.
Instead, the spacecraft could not return to Earth until Varda and three government agencies, the U.S. military, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Commercial Space Transportation Agency, and the FAA’s air transportation agency, were all on the same page. This was much more complicated than anyone had imagined, and Varda had to avoid landing opportunities in July and September because he was unable to obtain government approval.
Finally, the FAA earlier this month approved a commercial reentry license for Varda’s space capsule, which is slightly larger than a small refrigerator, to fall into the atmosphere and land by parachute in a remote desert in Utah, southwest of Salt Lake City. . Varda’s landing zone was located at the Utah Test and Training Range, a vast military facility used primarily for weapons testing.
Varda’s capsule landed in the Utah desert last Wednesday around 4:40 p.m. ET (2140 UTC). Approaching from the north, the ship was protected by a heat shield from the scorching temperatures of atmospheric re-entry. The capsule then deployed a 6.2-foot (2.1-meter) diameter parachute and slowed to a relatively gentle landing.
The recovery team will retrieve the approximately 200-pound capsule and connect it to a helicopter line for a short flight to a nearby processing facility, where engineers will prepare the spacecraft for transport to Valda’s headquarters in El Segundo, California. Became.
Derian Asparoukhov, who co-founded Varda in 2020 with former SpaceX engineer Will Bluey and scientist Daniel Marshall, said the mood at Varda after the successful landing was “super upbeat.”
“I always had confidence in the team’s ability to achieve this. It was only a matter of time,” Asparoukhov told Ars.
waiting game
Varda achieved several firsts in this mission. Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR) has some experience supporting spacecraft landings, but this is the first time a commercial spacecraft has landed at a military test range, subject to even more regulatory and bureaucratic oversight. In September, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission deposited a cache of asteroid samples in her UTTR.
Varda was the first company to receive an FAA commercial reentry license under the Streamlined Commercial Spaceflight Regulations, known as Part 450. This licensing paradigm is used regularly for commercial launches (there were 117 FAA-licensed launches last year). But this was a first. The company went through this process for re-entry.
Prior to Varda, the companies that received commercial FAA reentry licenses were Lockheed Martin, which conducted one test flight for the Orion spacecraft in 2014, and Lockheed Martin, which conducted more than 40 commercial flights for the Dragon crew and cargo spacecraft. There were only two companies that went, SpaceX. Both companies operated under the previous licensing regime until the FAA implemented revised Part 450 protocols in 2020.
The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space is responsible for authorizing commercial launch and reentry operations, and its primary concern is to ensure that these activities do not pose a risk to the public. But FAA air traffic controllers had to find time to clear a large area of airspace around the trajectory of Varda’s descending space capsule. The FAA’s temporary flight restrictions for Varda atmospheric reentry extend from southern Montana to western Utah over 400 miles (700 kilometers) long and 60 miles (100 kilometers) wide, especially for small spacecraft such as It was unusually large.
The timing of Varda’s re-entry and her access to secure military facilities also had to be coordinated with the test site’s busy schedule of military exercises.