Varda says it has proven space manufacturing works -- now it wants to make it boring

When Will Bruey talks about the future, the timelines are shorter than most might imagine. The Varda Space Industries CEO predicts that within 10 years, someone could stand at a landing site and watch multiple specialized spacecraft per night zooming toward Earth like shooting stars, each carrying pharmaceuticals manufactured in space. Within 15 to 20 years, he says, it will be cheaper to send a working-class human to orbit for a month than to keep them on Earth.

The reason Bruey thinks these scenarios are realistic is because he has watched ambitious business projections unfold before, while working as an engineer at SpaceX.

“I remember the first rocket I worked on at SpaceX was flight three of Falcon 9,” he said at TechCrunch’s recent Disrupt event . The partially reusable, two-stage