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

[AckSed]

5 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Think a top-of-the-line cpu production plant sets you back $10 billion anyway.   These things are expensive.

Part of the report is dedicated to the sections of production of CPUs that the LEO microgravity environment makes simpler:

Absences of buoyancy and sedimentation (responsible for many gravity-induced issues in Si crystal growth);

Absence of convection;

Absence of hydrostatic pressure (helps with precision placement);

Absence of container requirements (helps avoid contamination from the vessel holding it);

Access to 'free' vacuum, abundant solar energy and reduction in environmental impact.

It's also saying that the silicon wafer market is pretty much locked down, but the advanced semiconductor market (SiC, GaTe, CaTe) is just getting started, and the ISS has precisely one facility capable of running experiments to the temperatures needed - but it's not being used. Tiangong has that furnace.

Rest of the world (i.e. the US) needs to get in on that, especially as in another study (An Analysis of Publicly Available Microgravity Crystallization Data: Emergent Themes Across Crystal Types, 2022) 90% showed an improvement in one metric or another, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Of the 160 or so semiconductor materials known, 80% showed an improvement in one metric or another, again sometimes by orders of magnitude:

Quote

One analysis of these results on cadmium telluride (CdTe) crystals grown in microgravity (n = 9) concluded that improvements in crystal size and uniformity, combined with a decrease in orders-of-magnitude of defects, has the potential to increase yield of the final CdTe solar cell by greater than 150 percent.
 An increase in yield by just 3 percentage points can be worth as much as 6 percent in gross revenue, and it is hypothesized that a 150 percent increase in semiconductor yield from LEO manufacturing could have game-changing monetary advantages.

In short, high startup cost, but the potential to rake in the money, as long as you do the research and read the damn reports.

Edited November 15, 2023 by AckSed
Correction

[darthgently]

31 minutes ago, AckSed said:

Part of the report is dedicated to the sections of production of CPUs that the LEO microgravity environment makes simpler:

Absences of buoyancy and sedimentation (responsible for many gravity-induced issues in Si crystal growth);

Absence of convection;

Absence of hydrostatic pressure (helps with precision placement);

Absence of container requirements (helps avoid contamination from the vessel holding it);

Access to 'free' vacuum, abundant solar energy and reduction in environmental impact.

It's also saying that the silicon wafer market is pretty much locked down, but the advanced semiconductor market (SiC, GaTe, CaTe) is just getting started, and the ISS has precisely one facility capable of running experiments to the temperatures needed - but it's not being used. Tiangong has that furnace.

Rest of the world (i.e. the US) needs to get in on that, especially as in another study (An Analysis of Publicly Available Microgravity Crystallization Data: Emergent Themes Across Crystal Types, 2022) 90% showed an improvement in one metric or another, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Of the 160 or so semiconductor materials known, 80% showed an improvement in one metric or another, again sometimes by orders of magnitude:

In short, high startup cost, but the potential to rake in the money, as long as you do the research and read the damn reports.

+Bonus Like

[AckSed]

Buried in that report was this neat little site listing all the things space factories could make:

https://www.factoriesinspace.com/

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, AckSed said:

Buried in that report was this neat little site listing all the things space factories could make:

https://www.factoriesinspace.com/

++Like

[kerbiloid]

The space material to be produced #1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_wool

Spoiler

 

https://ru-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=ru&_x_tr_pto=wapp&_x_tr_hist=true#Технология_изготовления

 

Interesting fact: all googled photos show people working with it without protective spectacles, because they are fools.

[AckSed]

Asteroid-mining startup discovers that factories in space are hard. News at 11:

https://www.astroforge.io/updates/2023-update

Though in this case, half their troubles stemmed from not being able to find their satellite, then book enough time on ground stations when things went wrong.

Take note: heaters need magnetic shielding or they mess with sensors. Which then ensures the spacecraft can't point its antenna.

[darthgently]

58 minutes ago, AckSed said:

Asteroid-mining startup discovers that factories in space are hard. News at 11:

https://www.astroforge.io/updates/2023-update

Though in this case, half their troubles stemmed from not being able to find their satellite, then book enough time on ground stations when things went wrong.

Take note: heaters need magnetic shielding or they mess with sensors. Which then ensures the spacecraft can't point its antenna.

Apparently doing one's homework is really important no matter how excited you've gotten your investors