Space Manufacturing

[NGTOne]

OK, the question this time around is simple: of all the industrial/manufacturing sectors, which do you think would benefit most from a presence in space? i.e. for which sectors would space factories be most beneficial?

Personally, I'm of the view that the semiconductor industry will pioneer space manufacturing, possibly even without space mining concerns providing raw materials - semiconductor products have a high value/kg, the resources cost pennies on the dollar, and semiconductor manufacturing is already very capital-intensive. In addition, the 0G vacuum of space lends itself well to semicon fabrication, as a single mote of dust or a gravitationally-induced sag of a few µm on the ground can ruin a batch of product.

What do you all think?

Edited October 8, 2013 by NGTOne

[SargeRho]

Semiconductors, Drugs (as in, medicine), Superalloy production, and building spacecraft directly in space is probably going to be easier than building them on Earth, since you don't have to launch the craft from Earth's surface. As far as I know, it's far easier to get to Low Earth Orbit from the surface of the Moon than from Earth's surface. So the space industry could probably benefit massively from space manufacturing.

[drakesdoom]

I think the first priority should be mining and manufacturing in space. Get just enough up there to make more of what you need to make more of anything. Once we have even a foothold there will be an explosion of progress.

[Mr. Scruffy]

Semiconductors, Drugs[...]

Space-Camper in my head... moneywise seems plausible...

[Nibb31]

After decades of corporate-sponsorded studies on SpaceLab and ISS missions, there aren't really many killer applications for micrigravity manufacturing that would be worth the expense. However, if one does pop up, the rational way of integrating it into a manufacturing process would be to isolate the part of the process that requires microgravity and only send to orbit the specialized automated equipment to do that part of the job. Anything that doesn't require microgravity will still be performed on the ground.

I envision something like the X-37B or DragonLab for this. Launch it to orbit with your automated cristal-growing or zero-g-welding package on-board and retrieve it after landing 3 months later. If the product has the market value to justify the expense, then you might have a business case. But even at 50 million dollars a batch, it is going to be a hard sell.

As for manufacturing finished products from asteroid mining, people don't seem to realize how complex the manufacturing of finished products and how integrated an economy needs to be.

To build a spacecraft, the iron you can extract from an asteroid isn't that useful. You could produce ingots of minerals, but to make anything useful out of them, you would need all sorts of minerals, chemical consumables, and equipment that is simply too complex to produce from a single asteroid. You might need some iron, but most parts will need specific tensile, mass or temperature propertires that will require titanium, glass, aluminium, copper or various alloys or plastics or composites. Some of these things might not be obtainable on any of the accessible asteroids. And how would you build something as simple as a printed circuit board, or a connector cable, or a rubber seal in space? Think about everything that a simple screw factory needs to outsource, from lubricants, filters and seals for the machines to chemicals for cleaning and finishing the parts. These are things that are cheap and easy to source on Earth, because you can order each component and consumable from specialized suppliers all over the world, but to make any complex products from scratch on an asteroid would require so much specialized equipment and tons of consumables that it simply isn't feasible in the foreseeable future.

Edited October 8, 2013 by Nibb31

[drakesdoom]

Actually I don't have to imagine as I work in a machine shop. If you were to use only high end equipment you could put one cnc machine up there that could make any part that would fit inside out of any material with extra sets of cutting heads. Cutting coolant is recycled with 0 lost, chips care recycled into new stock, replacement parts are made in space before they are needed. All oils, plastics, and rubbers now have synthetic variations that can be made in a chem lab. High end filters never die you just wash them in solvent which is then boiled recovering all the oil, solvent, and chips for more recycling. Forget bringing the products back down, you make real spaceships that will never see atmosphere and there goes half the complexity and weight right there.

It would be extremely expensive but I could easily see a 1k ton factory that only needs raw material to make anything you want.

[Nibb31]

A CNC machine can still only transform blocks of metal into complex metal parts. It's only a small part of the process of building a spacecraft. You can't use it to make the actual raw material that it needs for new parts, metal sheets, tanks or large strutures, tubing or wiring, fabric, electronic components and semiconductors, paints and chemicals, fuel and consumables. And that super-versatile and fully-reconfigurable chemical plant is going to need refilling and cleaning with all sorts of hard to obtain consumables, which themselves will need their own mining and production facility.

I have no doubt that it is possible to construct a theoretical model where this is all possible, but to build a near-self-sufficient asteroid mining/spacecraft production facility is going to require a level of complexity, experience, and sheer mass that is pretty much beyond our techological capability or practical in the foreseeable future (30 years or more).

What is possible right now, and is necessary to kickstart interest in space manufacturing, is a self-contained orbit-and-return package that can fit onboard a retreivable spacecraft as part of a useful manufacturing process. Is there a practical application where this might be economically profitable in the near future? I don't know, but I suspect that if there was, the private sector would be showing interest in it.

Edited October 8, 2013 by Nibb31

[NGTOne]

I think part of it is that nobody's actually PROPOSED any sort of space manufacturing system, even as a blue-sky thing - I did a cursory literature search on the topic through my university's publications database, and nothing came up.

[Nibb31]

There were quite a few studies concerning potential manufacturing techniques in microgravity, especially during the Shuttle/Spacelab period. However, there wasn't much interest from the private sector. If you are looking for papers, then you should search for the actual techniques, like crystal growing, zero-g welding. The Wikipedia article has some interesting stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_manufacturing

It's quite rare that you have to propose a service out of the blue for major industries. Usually, when a need for something like this comes up, they find a way. The companies that would be potentially interested (big pharma or semi-conductor manufacturers) employ some of the bigger brains in the world, definitely smarter than you and me. These are people who are quite aware of the possibilities of microgravity, so if they haven't expressed any interest then there probably isn't a need in a need in the first place. If there was, then they would be asking for studies and getting experiments on the ISS.

[Kryten]

Part of the problem with the ISS is it's not actually a terribly good environment for a lot of these types of experiments. Doing studies on processes that are extremely sensitive to outside influences on a facility that shifts slightly every time anyone even moves inside of it is pretty difficult.

[Nibb31]

At one point, the Columbus module was going to be a free-flyer that would attach and detach from the ISS so that it could perform experiments in isolation from the vibrations of the station, but it was cancelled like the centrifuge and other essential science stuff.

The ISS is no good for an actual manufacturing facility (production manufacturing would probably be on a highly-automated dedicated spacecraft anyway), but it should be sufficient for experimentation and R&D or as a place to deploy and retrieve experiments.

[NGTOne]

There haven't been any experiments in part because there was no suitable platform for experiments.

Take semiconductor manufacturing, for example:

In order to experiment with semicon manufacturing in space, you have to put the whole infrastructure in space. Wafers are too fragile to launch in a rocket. So, basically, in order to build an experimentation infrastructure, you need to build a factory. Hence, no good platform for it.

[Dispatcher]

Logistics would be a challenge and the payoff probably many years away from the project start, but I like the idea of something like "Station 5" from "2001: ...". Its hub is a micro gee environment (the ships can dock outside instead of inside a bay) and gee forces are simulated in a graduated way from that low gee environment to whatever the outermost rim component is designed to handle (probably less than one gee but maybe up to one gee). This would facilitate science and industry at the most beneficial amount of gee force (position between hub and rim). 3D printing and other methods would be employed.

[Nibb31]

There haven't been any experiments in part because there was no suitable platform for experiments.

Take semiconductor manufacturing, for example:

In order to experiment with semicon manufacturing in space, you have to put the whole infrastructure in space. Wafers are too fragile to launch in a rocket. So, basically, in order to build an experimentation infrastructure, you need to build a factory. Hence, no good platform for it.

Then there goes your affordable business case.

Nobody is going to build an entire space factory just for the small part of the manufacturing process that would benefit from microgravity. A large facility would also necessarily suffer from the same problems as the ISS: vibration, a dirty environment (orbiting alongside the ISS is a cloud of various small debris, paint/insulation flakes, and vaporized fluids), and the cost of maintenance, resupply. This is all a non-starter because it would cost billions and corporations are driven by ROI figures.

The only solution in the foreseeable future is to only send up the equipment to do the portion of the job that benefits from microgravity as a standalone package on a small retrievable spacecraft, like a DragonLab or the X-37B. But I'm still waiting to find out what the actual application might be...

[NGTOne]

Then there goes your affordable business case.

Not entirely. Semiconductor fabrication is ALREADY very capital-intensive (the CHEAPEST new semicon plants cost on the order of a billion dollars, with the biggest ongoing project being in the realm of 12 billion), so, given the right environment, it might be possible to build an orbital facility of some nature for not much more than an existing ground-side facility. The upshot is, the cost of RUNNING a semicon plant is rather small. Downside is, the yield (actual amount of finished product they get for a given input) tends to hover around 30-40% (the exact figure is closely guarded). In space, even in a "dirty" environment like that surrounding the ISS, I estimate that yields would increase significantly, because two of the major factors in semiconductor rejection (airborne particulates and gravity) would no longer be present. In addition, the microgravity environment would allow for the fabrication of significantly larger wafers (on the order of meters across, something which is impossible on Earth because they would bend and crack due to gravity, ruining the batch), which would drive down process costs and allow greater innovation.

In short: the entire semicon production process, from beginning to end, would benefit from a 0G vacuum environment, with (with correct design) a capital cost not much more significant than that of building a terrestrial plant. Naturally, a high level of automation (something the semicon industry already does) is a must. The latest plants are even completely automated (the so-called "lights-out fab" concept).

Edited October 9, 2013 by NGTOne

[SargeRho]

Nobody is going to build an entire space factory just for the small part of the manufacturing process that would benefit from microgravity.

Not even when it's several times more productive than producing it on Earth? As NGTOne said, Gravity is the limiting factor in semiconductor production.

You can also make amazingly powerful alloys in microgravity, that are simply not possible to create in a 1G environment.