Space manufacturing startup Varda Space Industries will land its next spacecraft in Australia, the company announced Thursday, while continuing to work with U.S. regulators to get its first mission approved for reentry in Utah.
The U.S. Air Force and the Federal Aviation Administration last month rejected Varda's application to land its first spacecraft in the Utah desert. Delian Asparouhov, co-founder of Varda, said in a recent interview that the problem was mainly caused by the coordination among the three parties under a re-entry framework called Part 450.
"This has nothing to do with the safety of our vehicle, our design, our analysis, it boils down to a coordination issue between the three parties," he said, adding that the company met face-to-face with UTTR (Utah Test and Training Range) last week to begin coordinating a new set of target dates for bringing the vehicle home. "We are confident that we can technically meet all Part 450 regulatory requirements, it's just a matter of coordinating on a specific target window for reentry."
While the company continues to work with U.S. regulators, it has struck a new deal with Australia's Southern Launch that will see Varda's next capsule land at the Kunibah test site in 2024.
Asparukhov clarified that the company is not moving its next mission to Australia because of U.S. regulatory compliance issues - in fact, the company still needs an FAA re-entry license even if the capsule does not re-enter the atmosphere on U.S. soil - but rather that "different ranges have different availability and resources and different capabilities."
Understanding the availability of landing ranges is especially important for things like spacecraft re-entry. Although the rocket launch can be delayed by a day or a week, which is not a big problem for the launch vehicle, once the spacecraft performs a reentry burn, it will return to the ground regardless of whether regulatory agencies approve it.
Asparukhov said he expected Varda to eventually have at least three or four ranges ready, and UTTR made it clear early on that the startup began coordinating with other ranges. Asparukhov said working with multiple ranges has always been the company's plan as the company aims to eventually achieve a monthly re-entry frequency by 2026.
Regulatory burdens have been top of mind across the space industry this week, especially as three major aerospace companies testified before Congress unanimously calling for more resources to be allocated to the FAA to handle a surge in space launch activity. The companies also told lawmakers that further regulatory simplification is needed to ensure U.S. competitiveness on the global stage.
Speaking about space regulation, Asparukhov agreed:
"You could say that in 2013 and 2014, things were actually relatively streamlined. But over the last nine years, space activity has grown exponentially [...] So I don't think necessarily a change in policy is necessary, it's just a matter of staffing and speed of response. We certainly feel that, AST [U.S. Federal Aviation Administration] When I think about streamlining, I don't think it's necessarily some kind of change to safety or regulatory or anything like that. It's just a matter of how many staff can do the deep technical analysis that's involved in coordinating this kind of activity."