US space factory platform signs first customer to screen drugs in microgravity

An automated laboratory designed to study diseases and screen drugs in microgravity has secured a place on a new US orbital manufacturing platform built to return research samples to Earth. Outpost Technologies on October 2 said that Exobiosphere has become the first announced commercial customer of its Space Factories platform. Under the agreement, Exobiosphere’s Orbital High-Throughput System, or OHTS, will fly aboard Outpost’s CarryAll spacecraft. The booking comes ahead of Outpost’s planned orbital mission in 2028. The companies aim to combine repeatable access to microgravity with sample return, allowing researchers to analyze their experiments after they reach Earth. An automated drug laboratory in orbit Exobiosphere, a space biotechnology company headquartered in Luxembourg, is developing OHTS to support disease modeling, drug screening, and other orbital biology workflows. The automated laboratory is intended to help researchers investigate diseases and evaluate potential treatments in microgravity. Under the agreement, OHTS becomes the first customer research and manufacturing module slated to fly on Space Factories. CarryAll vehicles are intended to provide transportation and support the expansion of those activities. Returning biological samples is a central part of the approach. Researchers need access to those samples for further testing, validation, and development on Earth. Repeatable return could help Exobiosphere shorten experimental cycles and advance promising findings toward practical applications. “Microgravity accelerates biology in ways we simply can’t reproduce on Earth, and demand from researchers and pharmaceutical companies to run experiments in orbit already far exceeds the capacity of the International Space Station,” said Kyle Acierno, co-founder and CEO of Exobiosphere. Shared spacecraft infrastructure Space Factories combines reusable, free-flying CarryAll spacecraft with standardized containers and shared services. These include power, thermal management, data, and safety interfaces. The design allows customers to develop their own research or manufacturing modules while using a common spacecraft platform. Outpost says the expensive, complex infrastructure is built once and reused across missions, with the innermost module tailored to each customer. For Exobiosphere, that customized module is OHTS. The surrounding platform is intended to manage orbital operations, protect products, and support their return. “That’s exactly what we built Space Factories to serve: Exobiosphere brings the science, and we provide the standardized platform to fly it, operate it, and bring the results home. Their OHTS is a perfect first module,” said Jason Dunn, co-founder and CEO of Outpost. Bringing research back to Earth Outpost is developing the CarryAll vehicle family to host payloads in orbit and return cargo ranging from 200 kilograms to 10 metric tons. The vehicles are designed to accommodate anything from a single experiment module to a larger commercial manufacturing payload. Their planned pressurized, ISS-compatible environment is intended to support sensitive research and technology payloads. Outpost also plans reusable returns, precision landings, and flexibility in landing destinations, giving customers a potential route from initial experiments to larger manufacturing operations.The agreement arrives as the International Space Station approaches its planned decommissioning in 2030. As commercial orbital platforms emerge, Outpost is positioning sample and product return as a core service for companies that need both access to space and analysis on Earth.Get the latest in engineering, tech, space & science - delivered daily to your inbox.Atharva is a full-time content writer with a post-graduate degree in media & amp; entertainment and a graduate degree in electronics & telecommunications. He has written in the sports and technology domains respectively. In his leisure time, Atharva loves learning about digital marketing and watching soccer matches. His main goal behind joining Interesting Engineering is to learn more about how the recent technological advancements are helping human beings on both societal and individual levels in their daily lives.