A 120kg space capsule carrying NASA, US Air Force and cutting-edge MedTech payloads has safely landed in South Australia at local company Southern Launch’s test range, 45 days after launching on a SpaceX mission.
The touchdown on Friday marks Australia’s first commercial space re-entry landing and another important step for an emerging Australian space industry.
American space research firm Varda’s W-2 spacecraft launched from California last month, carrying a re-entry capsule housing a pectrometer, heatshield technology, and Varda’s own pharmaceutical reactor to test in-space medicine production.
45 days after launch, it touched down early on Friday morning at Southern Launch’s Koonibba Test Range. Southern Launch led the recovery mission and is helping Varda process the capsule before it is returned to Los Angeles for further analysis.
The local mission service provider secured regulatory approvals for the re-entry and was joined in the recovery by Varda partners and representatives from the Far West Coast Aboriginal Corporation – traditional owners of the land on which the capsule landed.
Southern Launch chief executive Lloyd Damp said the mission is an “incredible step forward for Australia” as a landing site for re-entries.
“The Koonibba Test Range is fully instrumented with telemetry, radars and ground and airborne optical and spectral image capture capabilities,” he said.
The pectrometer on board the capsule was developed by the US Air Force Research Laboratory and employed a heatshield developed in collaboration with NASA. It is expected to yield the first ever ‘in situ’ optical emission measurements of a spacecraft in true atmospheric re-entry.
The technology underpins the Prometheus Program, the US Air Force’s partnership with Varda on high-hypersonic systems and re-entry technologies.
Varda also used the mission that touched back down on Friday to further test its pharmaceutical reactor, which the company says will enable the production of life-saving medicine in space.
Two Centauri satellites from local SpaceTech Fleet Space Technologies were also onboard SpaceX’s Transporter-12 rideshare mission.
Later this month a launch window will open for Queensland company Gilmour Space Technologies’ landmark maiden test flight of its Eris orbital vehicle.
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