In February 2024 and February 2025, Varda Space Industries marked two historic milestones - the first purely commercial landings of space vehicles on American and Australian soil, respectively. The analysis engineer behind the successful flights was Marat Kulakhmetov. He architected the vehicle's aeroshell, pioneered the design of entry, descent, and landing concepts of operation, developed all flight dynamics and heating models and databases. He also wrote many of the analysis tools required for the vehicle to travel ~18,000 mph and land safely. You can find the results of this work on YouTube if you search "Varda Reentry." He accomplished all of this within three years of leaving a successful career at Blue Origin and joining Varda as the head of analysis and hypersonics, as one of the company's first 10 employees.

The 2024 mission demonstrated successful recovery of Form III Ritonavir, a pharmaceutical drug used to treat HIV/AIDS, and substantiated a viable "manufactured in space for Earth" market that is independent of the government-funded International Space Station.

In his first year at Varda, Kulakhmetov had realized that the reentry vehicles being developed for in-space pharmaceutical manufacturing could simultaneously serve as cost-effective hypersonic testbeds. He helped secure a $60 million StratFi program with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), leading to the transformation of Varda's commercial capsule into a hypersonic testing platform. The 2025 test flight qualified a novel ablative thermal protection system (TPS) now being baselined by NASA for a flagship mission to Uranus in the 2030s. That vehicle also produced the first known spectral measurements of reentry plasma above Mach 25 and now has a growing backlog of flights aimed at testing TPS, communication systems, and inertial navigation sensors.