It sounds like a super villain weapon.

If you manufacture there how do you recover it?

The Starfall capsule has enough deltaV to deorbit, a heat shield, and parachutes.

So you tell them where to deliver it (anywhere on the planet that its orbit goes over..), they tell you when it will be arriving, and it reenters and lands there.

Article about a recent test (launched on a Falcon 9):

https://www.afrl.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4629122...

> If you manufacture there how do you recover it?

The graphic shows it reentering the atmosphere.

Presumably the same way we have always recovered payloads from space. Heat-shield + parachute. I'm assuming there would be some capability to do a retrograde maneuver so that the re-entey can be done when and where desired, rather than leaving it to the whims of pure drag.

You're not wrong! It looks that way because it's a reentry vehicle. You put this thing in a low orbit which decays over the course of a few weeks until it eventually falls from space, then you go find it.