I came across an article on Wired recently which said that there is a future for manufacturing things in space instead of earth.
The article mentions that the microgravity of earth puts an implicit ceiling on the quality of products that can be manufactured – and manufacturing in space can overcome this. Manufacturing silicon crystals for semiconductors leads to impurities because of Earth's gravity – but this would be remedied by manufacturing in space. How true is this ?
It also said that China made a niobiyum-silicon alloy in it's space station. It is lighter and thrice as strong as titanium alloys used – and using it in engines would send hypersonic flights on great strides. There are challenges (brittle at room temperaturewhich prevent it from being mass produced today – but these are overcome with in-space manufacturing because of the low gravity.
- Is manufacturing in space really an important problem ? Will it really create help to manufacture things like vehicles in space ?
- What would the financial impact be ? Would the first movers create a monopoly ? Would a company manufacturing in space gain an exponential edge over a competitor manufacturing exclusively on earth ?
- What time frame would this be realistic in ?
Is the future of manufacturing in space ?
byu/MagicalEloquence inFuturology
14 Comments
Seeing how much lack of resources earth has and how resources space has, so yes definitely.
For the space industry it would be a huge step if they could expand into manufacturing as this would have the potential to expand the market. However in terms of the people on earth the impact won’t be huge as the production volume would be low in the near future. I don’t think we will see vehicle production as this needs a very complex supply chain and it’s still easier to launch is pieces and assemble in space.
Nobody knows the finanical impact until we acutally have it. Due to the high cost to build and low production volume, it could become a monopoly. If it’s used in defense, the might be several nations creating their own facilities. A company might have an edge over competitors, but only in very niche applications.
Time frame would depend on how complex the production facility is. I could imagine that there could be something ready in the 2030s for simple stuff.
We would need to solve the high cost of transferring things to and from space first. I mean it’s cool to imagine the stuff we could make in zero gravity, but if it all costs a million dollars per gram due to shipping, what’s even the point?
No.
Let’s think this through:
– Gather materials
– Load them into a rocket
– Shoot everything into the orbit
– Produce the goods somehow somewhere (space station, rocket?)
– Send it back to earth, it has to land save at a place you can easily reach
– Collect the products and distribute them
Sounds like way to cost and time consuming. Not to speak about the environmental costs and all the risks involved. This PR article is not speaking about all that for good reasons (they only want venture capital)
You would need to be manufacturing something that requires zero gravity and fetches a price high enough to send building sized rockets up with supplies. Making faster computer chips would have to be weighed against just making more regular ones that don’t require a flying building full of explosive fuel in their supply chain.
I personally fail to see how it could be a good use of resources, there are so many low hanging options to improve life and the environment that could use attention first. Why do we need faster computers and hypersonic flights when we force people to work under poverty wages and destroy the same environment the people that could afford hypersonic flights would be going on vacation to see? Who does this help?
How would you do welding in space (or other heat intensive processes) if you can’t dissipate the heat with convection? I assume radiating it away would take a pretty long time. Is there some way to change the dimensions of heat energy similar to how you can do with electrical wattage?
Long term future, yes, though it requires very high levels of autonomous systems
We kind of went to space way, way, way too early. We have zero capability to do anything remotely useful or interesting off of Earth.
It would be like if some guys from Spain discovered Hispaniola in 500AD with longboats. It’s cool, but there’s just no infrastructure nor any ability to remotely enterprise from it.
Even with SpaceX making rockets cheaper to go into space frequently with re-usable rockets, I firmly believe the answer is no…there is an increased cost, and who is willing to pay extra for a product that is slightly more perfect?
Not for a long long time.
We would need a justified reason and product that could only be produced in space for it to ever occur.
Currently there is absolutely nothing that needs zero gravity to produce.
Anything manufactured in space would need to be source and used there. I could see stripping an astroid and building a server farm in orbit.
Just wait, Trump will put a tariff on goods from space next.
Given that everything made in space has the added cost of getting everything to space I’d say, Yes, based on completely unfounded and ridiculous techno-optimism.
Aka
“Does the future of your manufacturing depend on which side of the bed Elon Musk woke up on and which of his businesses he or his Kremlin masters decided he’s going to wreck this week?”
(Sure fucking hope not).