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26.10.2023 17:50, Gennady Detinich
At the beginning of June, a mini-factory for the production of drugs in zero gravity was lifted into orbit at an altitude of about 1000 km. In the descent capsule, the resulting products were supposed to return to Earth in early September. But that did not happen. Permission to launch the capsule from the American regulator never released it.
Image source: Varda Space Industries
Earlier this week, at a Senate hearing in front of representatives from SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, SpaceX Vice President Bill Gerstenmaier told the F.A.A. “they need at least twice as many resources as they have today” for licensing rocket launches. In other words, the US Federal Aviation Administration, which also regulates space flights, has ceased to cope with the flow of tasks in the context of the commercialization of space.
The company Varda Space Industries from Torrance (California), one of the founders of which is Delian Asparouhov, fully felt the rigidity of the FAA and the US bureaucratic machine in general in its activities. Typically, commercial spacecraft do not require a landing site; they burn up in the atmosphere after completing their mission. In the case of Varda, the situation is different – the company needs to softly land the descent part with the medicine produced in orbit. In this they are pioneers and faced the state apparatus in full force.
There were no particular problems with landing space. Representatives of the company agreed on this with the military, who allowed it to be lowered to their test site – on a huge and deserted territory in the state of Utah. A capsule with samples from the asteroid Bennu landed at the same test site at the end of September. In this regard, Varda has prepared its plan for the return of the capsule to the FAA, indicating high-risk areas for ground facilities and aircraft. The risk level was assessed as 1 in 14,600, while NASA required 1 in 10,000. Some of these papers did not satisfy FAA employees, and the company was denied permission to lower the capsule to Earth.
The problem is that a private owner has to negotiate permission to land and maintain the space station with three agencies and two separate divisions within the FAA. In the Directorate, two divisions are responsible for the return of a spacecraft to Earth: one monitors the entry into the atmosphere, and the other monitors movement in the airspace. Each of them needs their own papers and calculations.
In order for the space plant to remain functioning in orbit, it is necessary to constantly maintain contact with it, and this is the domain of the FCC, which also requires papers and reports. The company has to regularly reassure the FCC that its coordination with the FAA is ongoing and promising to move in the right direction. The military, which allowed Varda to use the site to land the capsule, has its own tasks and may lose patience if all this drags on indefinitely. By now, there seems to be hope of landing a capsule with drugs in January next year, but at any moment everything could fall through.
The company began to consider moving its activities to Australia, where there are more deserted places and there is less risk of dropping the device on someone’s head or on someone else’s property. But it turned out that Australian outer space and airspace are also regulated by the US Federal Aviation Administration, so there is no hiding from the FAA even there.
The space plant’s first flight will remain suspended for another four months. It was a test. An old HIV drug, ritonavir, was tested in zero gravity. The researchers wanted to study the growth of crystals of the drug in microgravity conditions. It is not yet possible to find out what came of this.
2023-10-26 14:50:00
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