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I had never touched something from space until last week, when my fingers came away black with soot still clinging to a futuristic pod the size of a beach ball, built to ferry drugs back from orbit.

The capsule was made by US space company Varda, which is harnessing the fact that chemicals behave differently in microgravity to make new and possibly cheaper drugs in space (they’ve already cooked up a version of HIV drug ritonavir in low-earth orbit).

One of Varda’s space pods, used to manufacture drugs in space under microgravity. Credit: Varda

Last week during the International Astrona

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