A plan to make drugs in orbit is going commercial
Weight is the big obstacle to such dreams. It still costs around $7,000 to launch a single kilogram of payload into orbit, which makes it impractical to, say, send cotton into space to be dyed there, or even to launch the acids and solvents needed to make a semiconductor chip. But drugs may be among the few exceptions to this economic rule, since pound for pound, they can be as valuable as rare radioactive isotopes and fine-cut diamonds. For instance, just one kilogram of the weight-loss drug Ozempic is worth more than $100 million at retail. (The reason your Ozempic bill is only $1,000 a month is that minute quantities of the active ingredient are present in the shots.) That’s why Varda thinks it may eventually be able to manufacture drugs in orbit. However, its effort with United is more of a flying experiment to learn whether the company’s lung medicines will crystallize differently in microgravity. The terms of the deal between Varda and United aren’t public, and the companies haven’t said which specific drugs the …
