Stillroom Book a well
A scorched capsule sitting on the white crust of a salt lake at dawn, its orange and white parachute collapsed behind it.

We grow drug crystals in orbit and land them here.

Lake Hart, South AustraliaFlight 3, day 1306:09, under parachute

Thirteen days earlier, your molecule goes into a well.

A cassette holds 24 sealed wells of 2 ml each. Your chemist loads the solution in our Adelaide cleanroom. From that moment until it reaches the lab again, it is held at 20.0 °C, within a tenth of a degree.

What the capsule carries
Two technicians in white cleanroom suits lower an aluminium cassette into the open top of the capsule.
The aluminium cassette on a steel bench: a grid of 24 sealed wells with clear windows, gold tape along one edge.
The cassette. 24 wells, sapphire windows, its own heater and temperature logger.
A rocket's exhaust trail curving up into a pale dawn sky, seen from far away across still water.

Day 0. A rideshare from Vandenberg, California, carries the capsule to a sun-synchronous orbit 525 km up.

Separation 58 minutes after lift-off. First signal over Alaska 12 minutes later.

15 orbits a day

95 minutes each, at 7.6 km/s. Twelve days, 182 orbits, a sunrise every hour and a half. The capsule does nothing but keep the wells at temperature.

Inside, nothing falls.

On the ground, a growing crystal sinks, and warm liquid rises past it and stirs the well. In orbit both stop. Each crystal grows where it formed, at the same rate as its neighbours.

39 µm

013 µm39 µm102 µm120 µm
Flight   Ground control   Peaks from the paper; curve shapes drawn for clarity.

When Merck crystallised pembrolizumab (Keytruda) on the International Space Station, it came back as one population of crystals, 39 µm across. The same batch grown on the ground split into two, at 13 and 102 µm.

Reichert et al., Pembrolizumab microgravity crystallization experimentation, npj Microgravity, 2019.

What orbit changes, and what it does not
The curve of the Earth and a thin blue line of atmosphere, with the edge of the capsule and gold tape in the foreground.
Backshell camera, orbit 141, over the Southern Ocean.

Day 13, 05:52. A nine-second burn and the capsule starts to fall.

Heat shield−20 °C

Your wells20.0 °C

Altitude120 km

Speed7.6 km/s

At peak heating the wells move by less than a tenth of a degree.

06:14, Lake Hart. Forty minutes later the cassette is in a cold case.

Two recovery crew in orange hi-vis lift the cassette out of the capsule into a white insulated case on the salt.
A white ute drives a long straight outback highway at dusk.

Then 490 km down the Stuart Highway to Adelaide. The logger in the case records the temperature every minute of the way.

Close-up of a charred heat shield after flight: black cracked crust, streaks running outward, salt caught in the cracks, heat-tinted metal at the rim.

The shield after flight 2. The cracks are where it burned away on purpose, carrying the heat with it. We fit a new one every flight.

Day 14. Under crossed polarizers, a crystal goes dark every 90°.

That is how we know it is a crystal and which way it faces. Turn the stage.

A gloved hand places a slide on the rotating stage of a polarizing microscope in late afternoon light.

What comes back to you

  • Crystal size distribution, by laser diffraction and image analysis
  • Crystal form, by X-ray powder diffraction
  • Purity, by HPLC
  • The ground control: the same batch, grown the same day in Adelaide
  • The full temperature log, launch to lab

Report on day 21. Crystals shipped cold the same week.

Next flights

FlightLaunch windowLandsWells open
4, FeverfewMarch 2027Lake Hart9 of 24
5, TansyJuly 2027Lake Hart17 of 24
6, ComfreyNovember 2027Lake Hart24 of 24
Book a well How a flight works, and what it costs