About time. This was supposed to be a major application to generate shuttle payloads. Forty years ago. So far experiments have been flown regularly; first on the shuttle/spacelab, then on the ISS. I think there were some experiments that hitched a ride on satellite launches. Anyway, nothing even close to something resembling actual production.
Then, last year, the first commercial, dedicated flight ever, by Varda. Which I’d say was a proof of concept/tech demo mission, generating ritonavir in orbit. Which is a sensible, one-step-at-a-time approach to do something very, very complex. It looks like Varda is serious about this. Their real problem will be whether their investors are patient enough. Investors bailing out when they realise that space is hard after the first failure and return on investment will take serious time to materialize is what usually kills space ventures, from launch vehicles to asteroid mining. By the way, one of the investors here is Peter Thiel; make of this what you will.
