The Overlapping Galaxies of Delian Asparouhov

On planet Earth, the 29-year-old Peter Thiel protégé has been groomed for a top spot at Thiel’s Founders Fund. With the firm’s help, Asparouhov’s own startup has also rocketed into the commercial space race.

Delian Asparouhov, newly minted Founders Fund partner and co-founder of Varda Space Industries, is obsessed with speed. As a hobby, he’s getting his pilot’s license, hoping to eventually fly a fighter jet. On the ground, he prefers to listen to audiobooks at triple the normal tempo. And when he started Varda in late 2020, he set a moonshot goal: Launch one of its meter-wide pharmaceutical factories into space within two and half years, a feat that might’ve more reasonably been forecast to take five to ten years.

“You have to make a gut bet: ‘I will be able to finally make this work,’” Asparouhov told me last month from Founders Fund’s Miami office. From the eighth floor of the building in the Wynwood art district, we had sweeping views of the city skyline through floor-to-ceiling windows. “You’re not going to actually know until you go do the damn thing.”

Asparouhov is about to find out whether his need for speed will end in success. On Monday, Varda’s first factory—a triangular capsule filled with autonomous lab and drug-making equipment—is set to lift off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base near Lompoc, Calif. Theoretically, it’ll plummet back to Earth at 19,000 miles per hour about a month and a half later.