Exobiosphere to Become the First Commercial Customer of Outpost's New Space Factories, Bringing Microgravity Drug Discovery to Orbit and Back
Exobiosphere is a space biotechnology company developing high-throughput drug discovery capabilities in microgravity to help address some of humanity's most challenging diseases. Its Orbital High-Throughput System (OHTS) is an automated laboratory for disease research and drug development in orbit, supporting repeatable orbital biology workflows including disease modeling, drug screening, and sample return for downstream analysis on Earth. Under the agreement, OHTS becomes the first customer manufacturing and research module to fly on Space Factories, using Outpost's CarryAll vehicles to fly and scale. Reliable, repeatable return is critical to that model, enabling Exobiosphere to accelerate experimental cycles, validate results, and scale promising research from orbital studies into products and applications on Earth.
The agreement is the first commercial application of Space Factories, the reusable, modular manufacturing platform Outpost recently unveiled. Space Factories pairs Outpost's reusable free-flying CarryAll spacecraft with standardized containers and common services; power, thermal, data, and safety interfaces, so customers can focus on their process instead of building a spacecraft. The expensive, complex systems are built once and reused across every mission, while only the innermost manufacturing module is tailored to each customer. Exobiosphere's OHTS is the first such module, plugging into a common platform that handles orbital operation, product protection, and reliable return to Earth.
"Biopharmaceutical companies are beginning to treat microgravity as not just a research environment, but ready for scale manufacturing for therapeutics," said Jason Dunn, co-founder and CEO of Outpost. "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."
For companies building long-term microgravity research pipelines, access to orbit is only part of the challenge. Research samples, manufactured materials, and biological payloads often need to return to Earth for testing, validation, further development, and commercial use. That return requirement is becoming more important as the International Space Station (ISS) approaches its planned decommissioning in 2030 and commercial low Earth orbit (LEO) platforms begin to come online.
"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. "Outpost's Space Factories are how we meet that demand; a standardized platform that lets us fly more OHTS modules, more often, and reliably bring our results back to Earth, delivering on our mission to find 'Cures from Space.'"
Within Space Factories, Outpost is building CarryAll to provide the return lane for orbital missions for customers that need more than launch access. The vehicle family is designed to host payloads in orbit and return cargo ranging from 200 kilograms to 10 metric tons, accommodating a single experiment module or a full commercial manufacturing payload within a pressurized, ISS-compatible environment designed to support sensitive research and technology payloads in orbit. With reusable return, precision landing, and destination flexibility, CarryAll gives customers a scalable path from early orbital research to larger-volume manufacturing in space and on Earth.
The agreement comes ahead of Outpost's planned orbital mission in 2028 and, as the first commercial booking on Space Factories, signals accelerating demand for Earth-return logistics and standardized orbital manufacturing as companies look beyond launch access alone.
SOURCE Outpost Technologies Corp
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