SpaceX Launches Starfall Lab and a Cancer Drug Test on Bandwagon-5

Most rockets carry things into space and leave them there. A SpaceX Falcon 9 that lifted off from Cape Canaveral on Tuesday had another notion on board: spacecraft designed to come back, bringing whatever they made or tested in orbit with them.

The Bandwagon-5 rideshare mission carried 32 payloads, including SpaceX's own Starfall capsule, a disk-shaped craft the company describes as a microgravity lab, and a small capsule from Varda Space Industries that will test a cancer drug in orbit. Taken together, they point to a growing business in space manufacturing, and to a role for the Bay Area companies that already fill these rockets with satellites.

What Flew on Bandwagon-5

The launch ran a day behind schedule. SpaceX scrubbed Monday's attempt because of bad weather in the area where the first stage was supposed to land, and flew on Tuesday, October 20, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The booster, flying for the 19th time, landed on a droneship in the Atlantic, and SpaceX confirmed that all customer payloads were deployed.

Bandwagon is SpaceX's rideshare service for satellites headed to mid-inclination orbits, a cheaper way for smaller companies to reach space than buying a whole rocket. This flight carried 31 customer payloads, many arranged through the launch services company Exolaunch.

The manifest reads like a directory of the new space economy. Radar imaging companies Capella Space of San Francisco and Umbra of Santa Barbara sent satellites that can see through clouds and at night, and the Finnish company ICEYE added satellites of its own. San Francisco's Planet Labs launched Pelican-12, one of its high-resolution optical imagers. Xona Space Systems sent satellites for a planned commercial navigation constellation meant to complement GPS.

Impulse Space flew an orbital transfer vehicle that carries and drops off other payloads, and Portal Space Systems launched Starburst-1, a maneuverable demonstration spacecraft built to change orbits quickly.

Starfall, SpaceX's Orbiting Lab

The most unusual payload rode on top of the stack. This was the second Starfall to fly, after a first demonstration launched on a Falcon 9 in June. Starfall is a disk-shaped reentry vehicle about 3.1 meters across and 0.75 meters tall, with a mass of roughly 2,100 kilograms and room for up to 1,000 kilograms of cargo, according to figures from a Federal Aviation Administration environmental review.

"SpaceX has developed a new spacecraft called Starfall, which at its core is a microgravity lab," a SpaceX commentator said during the webcast of its first flight in June. The idea is simple: customers put experiments or production equipment inside, let them run in weightlessness and get the results back on Earth, with the capsule recovered after a splashdown in the Pacific.

SpaceX has not said what, if anything, flew inside this Starfall. But the company has said it eventually plans to launch the capsule on Starship, its giant reusable rocket, which could make returning cargo from orbit far cheaper and more frequent. For a company that already launches more often than anyone else, a ride home is a natural next product.

Medicine Made in Orbit

Varda Space Industries, based in El Segundo near Los Angeles, flew its seventh capsule, W-7. Varda's capsules process drugs in orbit and then reenter the atmosphere at very high speed before landing under a parachute.

This mission will test whether microgravity can improve the solubility of a cancer drug candidate known as a PROTAC, short for proteolysis targeting chimera. PROTACs are designed to tag disease-causing proteins so the cell's own disposal system destroys them, an approach several biotech companies are pursuing, including San Francisco's Nurix Therapeutics. Many promising drugs of this kind dissolve poorly, which makes them harder to turn into pills or injections. "In microgravity, molecules can crystallize differently than they do on Earth," the company says on its website, and different crystal forms can dissolve differently.

If it works, the payoff would not be orbiting factories full of pills. It would be finding better crystal forms in space that drugmakers might then learn to reproduce on the ground, or producing small quantities of high-value materials that are hard to make any other way.

Why Silicon Valley Should Care

Bay Area companies were all over this launch. Planet Labs and Capella Space, both headquartered in San Francisco, have built their businesses on frequent rideshare flights, and the region's venture firms have backed many of the space startups on the manifest. Cheap, regular launches are what make a satellite startup possible.

Space manufacturing could be the next wave of that business. Returning capsules turn orbit into a place to run experiments and make products, not just to take pictures or relay signals. That matters to the Bay Area's biotech, semiconductor and materials researchers, who are always looking for new ways to study and build molecules and crystals.

There is also a software story. Constellations like Xona's navigation network, and maneuverable spacecraft like Portal's, depend on autonomy, ground software and data processing, the kind of engineering the region exports to every industry. As more of these companies scale, they will need engineers who understand both orbital mechanics and cloud computing, a mix that Bay Area universities and startups are well placed to supply.

Will Factories in Orbit Pay Off?

The prospects are real, and they are growing. Launch prices have dropped sharply over the past decade, and reusable rockets now fly so often that companies can plan experiments in orbit the way they once booked time at a research lab. If SpaceX can recover Starfall reliably, and eventually fly it on Starship, the cost of bringing cargo home could fall the way launch costs did. That would open doors for drug research, advanced materials, fiber optics and other products that may benefit from weightlessness.

There are real worries as well. Reentry is hard, and every capsule has to survive extreme heat and land where it can be recovered. Regulators must approve each return, and Varda has already experienced long waits for landing permission in the past. Proving that a space-made drug or material is worth the expense is another hurdle: researchers have studied crystal growth in orbit for decades, and only a handful of results have changed how products are made on the ground. Each flight is expensive, and a single failed recovery can wipe out months of work.

Competition is another open question. With SpaceX building its own returning lab, startups like Varda now face a rival that also controls the rocket. Some investors see that as validation of the market; others worry it gives one company too much power over access to orbit and back.

Then there is the crowding problem. Each rideshare adds dozens of satellites to low Earth orbit, and space safety experts warn about collision risks and debris as the number of spacecraft climbs. Companies that bring hardware back, rather than leaving it in orbit, could help, but only if recovery becomes routine. Capsules that reenter over land or sea also raise safety questions for the people and ships below their flight paths.

The signals to watch are specific. Will SpaceX say what Starfall carried and when it lands? Will Varda's W-7 return on schedule, and will its cancer drug results be published? Will SpaceX open Starfall to paying customers, and at what price? And will Starship begin carrying return capsules, the step that could make manufacturing in orbit a real business?

From Clinic to Capsule

At Sparknify we follow how new technology reaches patients. Earlier today we looked at FDA Approves Hibsago, the First Functional Cure Option for Hepatitis B, a drug discovered in a California lab. Varda's capsule is testing a different path to better medicine: using weightlessness to change how drug molecules form, which could one day help researchers turn promising compounds into usable treatments. Medicine and space are not usually covered on the same page, but that is starting to change.

The rocket that carried them did the easy part; the real test is what comes back down.

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