The ultimate in offshoring: How cheap would heavy-lift have to become that manufacturing in orbit becomes viable?

[AckSed]

I had a little brainworm of a notion that asked, "What would it take for manufacturing in orbit to have the same impact of the export of heavy industry to modern-day China coupled with the global shipping network?"

Because when launch and downmass are really, stupidly cheap, with air-freight-like reusability... you might start to get the same absurdities that make buying, say, a pack of blue plastic beads off eBay, or a mobile phone battery from Aliexpress, and waiting for it to be shipped from almost halfway across the globe, an actually viable proposition.

I'm not talking about asteroid mining, I'm talking about something stranger: sending raw materials from Earth, into an orbiting factory, converted into the things you want built, and returned back to Earth. The asteroids could come later, but we'll stick to Earth-mined for now.

We'll also abstract the launcher and return vessel. *ahem*

"...our patented SuperCheap booster and SuperLift reusable second stage can lift and return 50 metric tons to SpaceMade's orbiting tele-operated factory complex in LEO for $50 per kilogram return. Lower rates available for 'bundling'. Our engineers assure us that we can bring the costs down even lower, perhaps by a factor of five. We deliver to most spaceports. Import fees listed on request."

The question I have to then ask: at this cost, what would make sense for this hypothetical factory to make? What about lower costs of launch? $25/kilogram? $10/kilogram? I'll assume its manufacturing has cost parity with a normal factory, but it has the advantages of cheap high-vacuum, abundant solar power and micro-gravity to make... whatever unique product that's an advantage for. It also has the disadvantages of radiation and needing to shed heat, but we'll assume the plant designer thought of that.

 

I think the scale looks like this:

$10,000,000/kg - This is where we are now. Commercial spaceflight has already dipped their toe in this, with Varda Space manufacturing rare pharmaceuticals such as ritonavir. (But they've run afoul of the FAA and gone to ask if Australia would be amenable. Something else that has to be worked out before the taps are opened.)

$100,000/kg - Aerospace parts, exotic semiconductors; this is *waggles hand* national defence-level money. Could also produce therapeutic radio-nuclides without worrying about the neighbours; I think I saw a proposal for producing radioactive Rhenium from proton bombardment of a tungsten oxide target... and one of the Van Allen belts just happens to be full of energetic protons.

$1000/kg - University projects, printing human organs in zero-G, specialised electronics, in-orbit production of satellites and probes.

$100/kg - Starting to edge into luxury novelty goods: metallic glass for golf clubs, perhaps space-grown crops  - Space-Cacao, anyone?

$50/kg - Drawing a blank. At this price you have a good shot at going sub-orbital and delivering to anywhere in the world in less than an hour, and damn the manufacturing. What do people think?

[magnemoe]

Part of the problem is that finding stuff who is better to make in space is also expensive. 
As I understand fiber optical cables for the long distance undersea runs might be an candidate. 

Other obvious ones might be crystals  who I guess fiber optic is part of, just very long.  
You pointed out medical use. 

One thing who will change then price goes down is also that price of testing goes down. 

[darthgently]

12 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Part of the problem is that finding stuff who is better to make in space is also expensive. 
As I understand fiber optical cables for the long distance undersea runs might be an candidate. 

Other obvious ones might be crystals  who I guess fiber optic is part of, just very long.  
You pointed out medical use. 

One thing who will change then price goes down is also that price of testing goes down. 

One thing to consider is that we've been researching materials and biology and manufacturing things in a gravity well of 1 gravity for all of human history.  We certainly have empirical blind spots as to the effect of doing these things in free fall.  There is fiber optics and medical (3d printing of organs etc) you mention, but there is no reason to not expect hundreds of subtle differences that could be leveraged that are simply not intuitive given the blindspot.  Any process that is better done with the least external forces involved would be candidates. 

What about a particle collider that circled the planet in orbit?  What more could we discover in basic physics at the much higher possible velocities in such a large loop in free fall?  Could this collider ring be used as a sensor of some type for large scale astronomical phenomena?  What about multiple rings?  Yeah, I'm stretching here, for the fun of it

[sevenperforce]

2 hours ago, darthgently said:

What about a particle collider that circled the planet in orbit?  What more could we discover in basic physics at the much higher possible velocities in such a large loop in free fall?  Could this collider ring be used as a sensor of some type for large scale astronomical phenomena?  What about multiple rings?  Yeah, I'm stretching here, for the fun of it

Good examples, but arguably those are things which would be one-way launches, which obviates the "up and down" element needed for the whole manufacturing economy of scale to operate.

One possibility would be higher-capacity microchips, or even quantum computing chips. Moore's Law is reaching its limits and will soon be obsolete (some are saying it already is). Once we have lower-cost access to space, I'm sure that some of these tech companies will be itching to experiment with ways that microgravity can increase the density or function of integrated circuit chips. With crystal growth in microgravity, perhaps we could see more true monolithic 3DIC chips, where transistors are "grown" on a three-dimensional lattice to achieve exponentially greater processing speed with a smaller footprint and reduced power consumption. That could be one of the enabling technologies that pushes manufacturing offworld, since the demand for higher transistor speeds scales in a way that niche/bespoke things like organ manufacturing do not.

Another potential avenue could be some sort of yet-unimagined solar powered fuel production system. We have a lot of technologies that depend on liquid-based fossil fuels and internal combustion engines, and there appear to be limits to battery density. What if we could send up a few hundred tonnes of waste plastic with some sort of solar-powered bacteria or bacteria-fungal symbiote that, once exposed to sunlight and microgravity, could "eat" through the plastic and produce hydrocarbons or some other hydrogen-dense fuel at scale, creating its own lattice structure to continually absorb more and more sunlight?

[AckSed]

Here's something that might be facilitated by cheap in-orbit manufacturing: waterless, high-efficiency recycling of lead-refining waste via vacuum distillation of metals. It also works to recover bismuth, tantalum from tantalum capacitors and germanium from coal fly ash. So those second stages could be loaded with (s)crap, unloaded into the factory, vented to low pressure and then heated.

Zone-refining metal and semiconductor ingots of all types would also work, and might even work better in freefall.

One thing that really should be worked out, though, is bulk material handling. The lack of gravity would be a boon in some ways (only moderately powerful cranes needed to transport large items), a curse in others (how do you get powders out of a hopper when even a small static/magnetic charge makes it stick to the sides? What about conveyor belts?)

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, AckSed said:

Here's something that might be facilitated by cheap in-orbit manufacturing: waterless, high-efficiency recycling of lead-refining waste via vacuum distillation of metals. It also works to recover bismuth, tantalum from tantalum capacitors and germanium from coal fly ash. So those second stages could be loaded with (s)crap, unloaded into the factory, vented to low pressure and then heated.

Zone-refining metal and semiconductor ingots of all types would also work, and might even work better in freefall.

One thing that really should be worked out, though, is bulk material handling. The lack of gravity would be a boon in some ways (only moderately powerful cranes needed to transport large items), a curse in others (how do you get powders out of a hopper when even a small static/magnetic charge makes it stick to the sides? What about conveyor belts?)

Great idea once very cheap kg to orbit is achieved.

On a related note, I presented a challenge in one of these threads a while back to come up with an orbital manufacturing process that leveraged the heat and high G of re-entry as one of the final steps of the manufacturing process.  I'm intrigued by the possibility of making practical use of all that orbital energy once one is done with it.  I could see some kind of annealing or tempering of your suggested recovered metal fitting the description. 

Edited October 30, 2023 by darthgently

[Nuke]

the thing thats cheaper to build in space is space infrastructure. still want that moonbase shipyard that can handle nuclear engines without posing a threat to the earth. 

[magnemoe]

On 10/30/2023 at 11:41 AM, darthgently said:

One thing to consider is that we've been researching materials and biology and manufacturing things in a gravity well of 1 gravity for all of human history.  We certainly have empirical blind spots as to the effect of doing these things in free fall.  There is fiber optics and medical (3d printing of organs etc) you mention, but there is no reason to not expect hundreds of subtle differences that could be leveraged that are simply not intuitive given the blindspot.  Any process that is better done with the least external forces involved would be candidates. 

What about a particle collider that circled the planet in orbit?  What more could we discover in basic physics at the much higher possible velocities in such a large loop in free fall?  Could this collider ring be used as a sensor of some type for large scale astronomical phenomena?  What about multiple rings?  Yeah, I'm stretching here, for the fun of it

Particle accelerators operate on an level there gravity is irrelevant. Its is for elemental particles anyway or why it was so hard to prove  that antiparticles felt gravity like particles. 
Now if you make an multi kilometer diameter rotating pace station make rooms for some particle accelerators in the basement. 

16 hours ago, Nuke said:

the thing thats cheaper to build in space is space infrastructure. still want that moonbase shipyard that can handle nuclear engines without posing a threat to the earth. 

Nuclear reactors are pretty inert until started. Recycling one, then polluting the moon surface would be an thing if done large scale. 
Radio telescopes on the far side of the moon, that is something you could build and might be one of the lunar Starship spin off ideas as you got serious mass to work with. 
 

Edited November 3, 2023 by magnemoe

[kerbiloid]

If God wanted humans to manufacture in space, the Moon would be made of coal.

Edited November 3, 2023 by kerbiloid

[darthgently]

2 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

If God wanted humans to manufacture in space, the Moon would be made of coal.

And the fact that it is made of cheese means what?  We should bake crackers in space?

[kerbiloid]

3 minutes ago, darthgently said:

And the fact that it is made of cheese means what?  We should bake crackers in space?

It's for mice.

Spoiler

 

[farmerben]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

If God wanted humans to manufacture in space, the Moon would be made of coal.

Nah its aluminum and silicon.  Much better for a Kardashev II civilization.

 

In the long run we want to surround our star in computronium.

Edited November 3, 2023 by farmerben

[Kerbart]

You're still adding hundreds of dollars of cost, even to lightweight products, so there needs to be a really good reason to manufacture in zero-g. And once that reason exists, I bet even thousands of dollars launch cost will be acceptable. So while dropping launch costs will make things possible I don't think they will have to drop that low for it to happen.

Edited November 3, 2023 by Kerbart

[darthgently]

39 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

You're still adding hundreds of dollars of cost, even to lightweight products, so there needs to be a really good reason to manufacture in zero-g. And once that reason exists, I bet even thousands of dollars launch cost will be acceptable. So while dropping launch costs will make things possible I don't think they will have to drop that low for it to happen.

The big market for space manufacturing will eventually be markets in space.  The goods won't be coming back to Earth and the raw materials won't be coming from Earth, but yeah, in the short and medium term, the market is here.  In the medium term, it may come down to materials that are cheaper from the Moon than launching from Earth and benefit from vacuum or zero G.  Titanium products come to mind as the Moon has it and it's a pain to work hot in an oxygen environment

[Nuke]

2 hours ago, Kerbart said:

You're still adding hundreds of dollars of cost, even to lightweight products, so there needs to be a really good reason to manufacture in zero-g. And once that reason exists, I bet even thousands of dollars launch cost will be acceptable. So while dropping launch costs will make things possible I don't think they will have to drop that low for it to happen.

lunar manufacturing is a drop in the bucket compared to semiconductor fabrication. there are a lot of successful industries with astronomical start up costs. 

[StrandedonEarth]

1 hour ago, darthgently said:

In the medium term, it may come down to materials that are cheaper from the Moon than launching from Earth

Given the increasing environmental opposition to large new mines in general and in developed countries in particular, I expect it to eventually be cheaper to mine the Moon and NEOs for shipment to Earth, than to satisfy the BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything).

[kerbiloid]

Fewer people need less resources, and is much cheaper to achieve. I believe, it's more probable than space industry in this century.

[StrandedonEarth]

9 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Fewer people need less resources, and is much cheaper to achieve. I believe, it's more probable than space industry in this century.

There is that scenario as well, and the way things are going that's a distinct possibility.

[darthgently]

15 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Fewer people need less resources, and is much cheaper to achieve. I believe, it's more probable than space industry in this century.

That seems to be the bifurcation in the road that we are arriving near as a species.  I hope we make the choices that go with the flow of the river of life instead of against it

Edited November 4, 2023 by darthgently

[kerbiloid]

About the Moon.

While the rare-earth lunar Eldorado is yetr mostly apocryphal, what's really real is the lunar titanium. The Moon has a lot of it.

And there is no purpose for the lunar titanium outside of the Earth till the far-future projects like low-solar-orbit light collectors, low-jupiter-orbit charged particle collectors, etc. 
Thus, the lunar Ti should be mostly delivered to the Earth.

To let it make sense, the lunar production of Ti must be at least comparable to its production on the Earth, which is currently ~9.5 mln t of TiO₂ per year.
So, ~5.5 mln of Ti/year. I.e. 15 000 t / day.

As it's hard to deliver anda land 15 000 t/day softly, it should be thrown there, and then fall here.

This mean 15 000 t of white-hot metal daily passing through the Earth atmosphere per day.
It can solve the problem of the cities illumination, and will make the night sky very spectacular: the mesh of bright dots of tens of thousands of skylink and other LEO sats, crossed with a fiery comet rain of the falling titanium.

[darthgently]

7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

About the Moon.

While the rare-earth lunar Eldorado is yetr mostly apocryphal, what's really real is the lunar titanium. The Moon has a lot of it.

And there is no purpose for the lunar titanium outside of the Earth till the far-future projects like low-solar-orbit light collectors, low-jupiter-orbit charged particle collectors, etc. 
Thus, the lunar Ti should be mostly delivered to the Earth.

To let it make sense, the lunar production of Ti must be at least comparable to its production on the Earth, which is currently ~9.5 mln t of TiO₂ per year.
So, ~5.5 mln of Ti/year. I.e. 15 000 t / day.

As it's hard to deliver anda land 15 000 t/day softly, it should be thrown there, and then fall here.

This mean 15 000 t of white-hot metal daily passing through the Earth atmosphere per day.
It can solve the problem of the cities illumination, and will make the night sky very spectacular: the mesh of bright dots of tens of thousands of skylink and other LEO sats, crossed with a fiery comet rain of the falling titanium.

And if it were just chunks of refined Ti those lights would be very bright indeed hurdling through the oxygen atmo with lots of product lossage.  But what a spectacular light show!

There was a time when people thought most of the land between the Mississippi and California was not practical to occupy.  I think most of the lunar Ti will be used off planet Earth sooner than most imagine

As for on Earth, imagine most hand tools that are now made of steel (wrenches etc) being fully manufactured in space of Ti and deorbited in huge reusable containers containing 10k+ pieces, as an example

Just the reduction in mass of tool belts and work vans worldwide would be significant,

Edited November 5, 2023 by darthgently

[StrandedonEarth]

10 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

As it's hard to deliver anda land 15 000 t/day softly, it should be thrown there, and then fall here.

This mean 15 000 t of white-hot metal daily passing through the Earth atmosphere per day.

See, I always figured the easiest way to deliver space-mined metal to Earth would be to slam metal slugs into the deserts. The cooling effects of the clouds of dust shot into the atmosphere would be bonus. Of course, weaponization of such a system could be problem.

For some reason I don't think this concept has been seriously considered... 

(/s)

[kerbiloid]

Tornado Alley.

The titanium slugs should be made porous and get pulverized on reentry.

Then the tornadoes are catching them above the ocean and softly spread along the Tornado Alley, making a blinding-white TiO₂ ridge.

***

Or The Ring.

Throw the TiO₂ slugs to LEO to form a planetary ring shining in the sky and slowly aerobraking as an equatorial titanium dust rain.

Of course, it requires collector rafts along the equator, but why not.

Edited November 6, 2023 by kerbiloid

[darthgently]

17 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

The cooling effects of the clouds of dust shot into the atmosphere would be bonus

If you want snowball earth (again), that may be one way to do it

[kerbiloid]

If cover the Earth with thin layer of TiO2, it will be snow-white, and the global warming will be finally unwarmed.

Wait... It's finally an aim for the lunar mining, and even Greta The Great will bless it.