Medicines made in space set to touch down in Australian outback

Sometime this week, a 1-metre-wide capsule will fall from the sky and land in the South Australian desert carrying a cargo of drugs.

Since launching on a SpaceX rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on 14 January, a reactor on board the capsule has been manufacturing an undisclosed, proprietary pharmaceutical compound.

Varda, the US-based company that built the capsule, is aiming to show that producing drugs in low Earth orbit…