How Varda Solved Manufacturing in Space

Peter Thiel is one of the most legendary investors in Silicon Valley. I build companies and I support people who are building new things, from social networks to rocket ships. He's helped build PayPal, Facebook and Palantir into massive multi billion dollar companies. And now he has his sights set on space manufacturing. And I'm not talking about making rockets here on Earth. When I say space manufacturing, I actually mean producing physical goods in low earth orbit and then bringing them back down to Earth. If all that sounds a little crazy, don't worry. It was completely new to me when I started working on this video. But I'm going to take you through the fascinating history of space manufacturing and then work through exactly how Thiel and his team are planning to make this a reality. When you're a multibillionaire like Thiel, you don't need to get your hands dirty with founding a company to attack an interesting problem anymore. Thiel has created a platform for building and scaling the most promising business ideas with founders fund, his $6 billion investment firm. And Founders Fund isn't like most venture capital shops. The majority of VCs focus on meeting entrepreneurs that are running existing businesses and then giving them money to help grow what's already working. They usually take a board seat and help set the high level strategy, but it doesn't go much deeper than that. And Founders Fund does do a lot of deals that look exactly like that. But recently they've been going a level deeper and actually co founding companies alongside entrepreneurs. They did this with the defense technology company Onderil, where Trey Stevens, who's a partner at Founders Fund, stepped up to co found the company alongside Palmer Luckey. This model is typically called an incubation or a venture studio company and there have been some massive successes. The cloud storage company Snowflake was started this way by Sutter Hill Ventures and is now worth $80 billion. And this is the model that Thiel and Founders Fund are using to make space manufacturing a reality. As at the center of this project is Delian Asparahov. He's VC at Founders Fund and a co founder of Varda Space Industries. He'd been tracking the trends in the aerospace industry for years and assembled a team to build this new company. The name Varda is a Tolkien reference. Like the other Founders Fund incubations, Palantir and Onderill, Delian has basically been speedrunning Silicon Valley for the past eight years. His resume has it TED Talk, check. MIT dropout, check. Y Combinator founder, check. Startup investor, check. And now he's Basically speedrunning the company building process. Varda raised a $9 million seed round back in December of 2020, and they just closed a $42 million Series A in July of 2021. That's a pretty insane amount of money to raise so quickly. But Delian has a unique strategy for capturing this new market that completely justifies a more aggressive fundraising timeline. The typical path in Silicon Valley used to be work for a big company for 10 years, then work for a startup for the next 10, and then maybe become his VC in your 40s. But Delian is moving ridiculously quickly, which will be a big theme throughout this story. In fact, he's so obsessed with speed that he counts the exact number of days since Varda was founded.

This is the best way to institute an ethos, because at the end of the day, the thing that is always difficult about startups is early on, it's easy to move super fast. When you're like six people in a room, you all can communicate, really easy, et cetera. Once you become 600, all of a sudden there's decision start to slow down, things start to slow down.

It's easy to look at Delian's insane level of energy and think that he might be getting ahead of himself on this whole manufacturing stuff in space thing. But he's been watching the industry closely for years, and space manufacturing actually dates back to the 60s. It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

Our great system will be judged by how we do in the field of space.

Even though America won the space race and landed a man on the moon on July 20th 20th, 1969, it was the Russians who were technically the first to manufacture something in space. During the Soyuz 6 mission, Russian cosmonauts welded aluminum, titanium and stainless steel together using a hardware unit called Vulcan. Four years later, the United States launched Skylab, a fully functional space station equipped with a materials processing facility that could grow crystals, process alloys, and weld metals using an electron beam. All told, NASA astronauts spent 32 man hours manufacturing stuff in space during that mission. And they made some pretty significant contributions that would be rolled into future missions. Ten years after the Skylab launch, NASA began using the space lab facility. Spacelab was a module that was carried aboard the space shuttle 26 different times and served as a short duration research platform. It wouldn't stay in space, but while it was up there, it accomplished some pretty incredible things. Spacelab was an extremely large program and could be reconfigured for each mission, which led to an extremely High throughput of experimentation. For example, in just one mission, NASA performed 73 separate experiments in material science, astrophysics, and atmospheric research. Here's a picture of a mercuric iodide crystal that was Growned on Spacelab 3. Pretty incredible. Fast forward to today, and essentially all space manufacturing takes place on the International Space Station. Most of the products that are made in space are designed to stay in space. And this makes sense. Giving astronauts the ability to fabricate parts quickly while aboard the space station speeds up research and development. And there's even a plan to 3D print food on the station eventually. But Delian has a completely different vision for Varda.

The more, let's say, commercial reason to start the company is that there's actually a whole wide array of products that that could significantly improve quality of life for people here on Earth that can only manufacture it in microgravity.

Delian wants to bring everything that Varda makes in space back down to Earth. If that sounds insanely expensive, that's because it is. At least for now. Delian's entire plan with Varda is to position the company to take advantage of the exponentially decreasing cost of space travel. See, when it comes to making computer chips, we've been blessed by exponentially decreasing costs for decades. Now, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit essentially doubles every two years. This is called Moore's Law, and it explains why computers have been getting smaller, faster, and cheaper so consistently. Something similar is happening with space travel. Right now. When the space shuttle was in operation, launching a single kilogram into space cost $54,000 on average. SpaceX has been able to reduce that cost to just under $3,000 using their Falcon 9 rocket. And it's only getting cheaper. Every year, SpaceX is launching more and more rockets and dropping the cost of getting to space. This is critical for Delian's plan for Varda and the main reason why he couldn't pursue this idea sooner. Elon plans to bring the cost per kilo down to just $10 with Starship. And while that's certainly an ambitious target, if he can even get close, the economics of space manufacturing will start to make a lot of sense. But you're probably asking yourself, what would you even make in space? We seem to be doing fine here on Earth. So what could possibly be worth all this effort? Well, there are a few good examples. The first is human organs. Growing a replacement heart or kidney in space might sound a little weird to some people, but if you're one of the 100,000 people waiting for an organ transplant, I'm pretty sure you won't care where it came from, as long as it works. And there's a lot of evidence suggesting that growing organs in microgravity you yields remarkable results, since the cells don't collapse under their own weight. In space, Semiconductor film Could also benefit from low Earth orbit production, with some studies estimating that quality could increase by 10,000%. That's a huge step up from what's possible on Earth. But that's because semiconductor film not only benefits from the microgravity environment, but also from the complete lack of dust in space. Tiny dust particles routinely reduce the effectiveness of semiconductors here on Earth. But that's not a problem 1000 miles up. The third opportunity is fiber optic cables, which powers the entire global Internet. There is a special type of fiber optic cable Made from fluoride glass called zblan that could have as little as one tenth the signal loss of traditional optical fiber. The problem is that these ZB land fibers Are extremely difficult to make here on Earth. And again, it all comes down to gravity. As the molten glass is stretched into ultra thin fibers, Tiny crystals tend to form, which can weaken signals when you're up in space, the microgravity environment Suppresses the formation of these crystals, so the resulting cables can carry more data over longer distances. Human tissue growth has been tested on the iss, but it's impossible to even try fiber optic production in space.

Currently, for example, in a lot of fiber optics, There's a toxic chemical that you want to coat the fiber optic with that protects it at the end of the process. No way is NASA going to let you put that toxic chemical in the iss. If that thing gets out, like, you're potentially killing astronauts.

But Varda's space factories will be completely autonomous. Everything Varda launches into space Will be completely self contained, Meaning they can work on any manufacturing problem without risking human lives. Okay, so we've established that what Varda's trying to do Is only possible because scientists have been testing space manufacturing for decades, and SpaceX has dropped the cost of rocket launches so dramatically. But here's where the technology gets really interesting. See, Varda won't be building rockets, Only payloads that sit on top of SpaceX rockets. But they still have to solve a few key problems Once everything is actually up there. So Delian and his team are focusing on building three different systems. The first is the actual factory. This needs to be small enough and light enough to fit on a rocket While still holding all of the raw materials for whatever they are. Going to make on that trip. But you can't just shoot a box into space and hope that it stays up there and then lands where you can find it. So they are also building a satellite to accompany the factory in space and serve as a command and control module. Lastly, once the product is actually finished, you have to get it back down to Earth and that's no easy task. Atmospheric re entry is an extremely risky maneuver and by far the hardest part of getting anything from space home safely.

We have our regulated by the FAA because like we're reentering over airspace. If we like miss, you know, the atmosphere even literally by like three or four seconds, you're talking about like rather than like landing in the United States, you're like accidentally like landing in like Europe.

This really illustrates how aggressive Delian's plan is for Varda. There are a few other companies that are working on space manufacturing currently, but they mostly focus on developing the factory exclusively and then partner with NASA to get everything to the space station and back. The scale of the re entry problem really can't be understated. In order to stay in orbit, anything in space needs to be traveling incredibly fast. A commercial airliner typically flies at around 500 miles per hour, but the International Space Station is is traveling at 17,000 miles per hour. The deceleration that occurs during reentry is extremely powerful. And anything Varda makes in space will have to be able to make it through reentry without getting damaged in the process. This part of the equation is so critical to Varda's success that Delian even recruited a CEO with experience specifically in reentry.

But I realized that for the CEO position I wanted somebody that sort of had been at SpaceX specifically on Dragon in particular, because we have a sort of re entry problem that we're trying to solve. And you know, the Dragon is basically the only commercial reentry vehicle that's ever been built.

Varda is clearly a moonshot type of company, but Delian is placing his bets very carefully. SpaceX is top notch in terms of rockets, so no need to re engineer things there. But no one has figured out how to solve re entry at the industrial scale. Varda is aiming for not even NASA. NASA is an amazing organization, but their budget is just $24 billion per year. For comparison, Walmart spends that much money every three weeks. While partnering with government research teams can work in some cases, it's not ideal for scaling an entirely new industry. For Varda to be truly successful, they need to be launching dozens of factories to space every month.

With varda, the initial product that we're going after, if we were to eventually satisfy the entire market that going to we're going after, we would have multiple of our reentry capsules Coming down per day, and we would be buying a SpaceX rocket every other day.

Okay, so clearly varda has ambitious goals. But exactly how big of a market is space manufacturing anyway? Well, it's currently a rounding error, but the global space industry Is valued at around $420 billion, and that's growing really rapidly. Just last year, investors poured nearly $10 billion into space space companies, each with slightly different approaches. Companies like Hadrian and relativity Are developing products on earth that are meant for space. And a company called made in space is, you guessed it, making things in space. But everything made in space produces is meant to stay in space, not come back down to earth. That's where varda is unique. When it comes to the growth of the space industry, we're seeing steady progress start to compound in all, all sorts of key metrics. The cost of launching a satellite is falling dramatically. The time between launches is getting shorter and shorter, and even the number of humans who have been to space Is increasing faster than ever before. When Jeff Bezos returned to earth after his trip on blue origin's New Shepard rocket, He had some really poignant words about the importance of space manufacturing.

We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry and move it into space and keep earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is now. That's going to take decades and decades to achieve. But you have to start, and big things start with small steps.

So can space manufacturing become a $7 trillion industry? That number is certainly a bit ridiculous, but the global manufacturing industry does generate well over $7 trillion per year. And sure, we're not going to move all of that to space space anytime soon, but what about in a hundred years? How about a thousand? Humanity is going to become multiplanetary probably within our lifetime. And when we begin seriously expanding our solar footprint, we're going to have options as to where we choose to build specific things. We'll be able to put certain things on earth, Other things on Mars, and we'll have plenty of space in between. Pun very much intended. Some people find it difficult to get excited about things that will take years, if not decades, to bear fruit. But I, for one, am not one of those people. Big things have small beginnings, and varda is clearly the first small step in an incredible direction. If you want to chat about space manufacturing, Just leave me a comment below or DM me on Twitter. And please check out this recommended video. The YouTube algorithm thinks that you'll really like it.