What are some of the things that they are trying to produce in space, taking advantage of microgravity?

Varda is interesting because while they build and operate these autonomous space capsules, I spoke with a number of people at the company, they see themselves just as much as a pharmaceutical company that happens to dabble in space than, like, an aerospace company.

Their whole idea is that pharmaceutical compounds can be processed in microgravity, that they can take on properties that would be difficult to achieve in a manufacturing facility on Earth.

If you could, for example, crystallize the drug, but in such a way where all of those crystalline particles were very small and very uniform in size, you might be able to reprocess the drug that would you'd normally administer via IV over several hours and concentrate it while also making it thin enough to where you could inject it as a shot.

So you could take a drug that would normally take several hours to administer and make it a one and done shot without altering the compound itself, but rather altering the way it's sort of processed and crystallized.

Their hope and their bet as a business is that this is gonna help improve the delivery of drugs and allow them to make money doing it

So is this all just gonna move to the private sector?

You know, the first decade of the life of the ISS, it was being assembled, and then the second decade of the ISS was really kinda getting it outfitted as a laboratory and kinda getting those reps in.

It's a really stark contrast, but it's also a really exciting time.

I think one of the things that makes this such an interesting and important story for not only science to cover, but why it's getting so much attention generally, is not only the promise of these technologies, but the profound disruptions that they may represent across a wide variety of different areas-

Oh, yeah.

Uh, and one of the things I heard consistently, particularly from the European folks I talked to, was that they were beginning to see an uptick in their applicants to their PhD programs from the United States or from applicants who would've otherwise considered applying to the United States.