Factories Will Produce Materials in Space that Can’t be Made on Earth

Aerospace engineer Andrew Bacon co-founded U.K.-based “Space Forge” because the “Earth is a terrible place to make things.” At least, the kinds of things he wants to make. Bacon has bold plans to “begin manufacturing certain high-performance materials in autonomous factories on returnable satellites.” His nifty idea aims to “help dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions” and the company just scored a cool $10.2 million to work with.

Orbital robot factories

Bacon teamed up with Joshua Western and named him CEO of the startup. Together they paved the groundwork to exploit the unique space conditions of micro-gravity and near perfect vacuum. They promise their robot factories will be able to make things “that can’t be made on Earth.”

For instance, a new form of home-spun fiber-optic cable has already been cooked up in the International Space Station. Gravity and impurities in the air on Earth cause the material to be cloudy but the orbital environment in space allows the finished product to be crystal clear.

The big key to choosing which products get turned out by the robot space factories is how valuable they are. First, the goods must be worth assembly hundreds of miles above the surface of planet Earth. Shipping costs are enormous.

The fiber-optic project is economically feasible because they “can transmit 100 times faster data than a silica one, and that means they are worth $6 million a kilogram.” The market price for satellite launch is running between $5,000 and $10,000 per kilogram, which Bacon says “actually starts to make economic sense.”

Another application for space factories which comes to mind is aimed at data centers. They can benefit from “space-made materials to become more efficient.”

The Space Forge founders are horrified at “how much energy is used just in moving data around the world.” Bacon explains that you can trace a lot of it “all the way back to the efficiency to what material the semiconductor is made out of.” Once again, semiconductor impurities are in the air.

It all adds up

In space, microchips can be made in orbital factories with both fewer impurities and better materials. The efficiency quickly starts to snowball. As Bacon points out, “if you improve the efficiency of a semiconductor by 20%, that actually has a much bigger knock-on effect than just reducing the power budget by 20%.”

On top of that, it “also means that I need a smaller cooling system, and I need a smaller power supply to drive that.” The overall effect is that “the whole system might cut energy use by 60%.”

Another advantage is that it’s a whole lot easier to get to extremes of temperatures in space. Extra-Terrestrial factories can achieve very high or very low readings without effort.

“Because there’s no air, effectively, in space, it’s very easy to heat something up to a really high temperature. Or, if you point your satellite away from the sun and away from the Earth, you can cool down to about 10 degrees above absolute zero.”

Engineers are also attracted to low-g metallurgy. “Metal alloys are easier to make, because gravity doesn’t pull metals of different weights away from each other.”

That means the Space Forge factories can manufacture “new alloys that can be used to make bigger, stronger, turbines on aircraft, so planes use less fuel.” Other helpful gadgets include things like improved batteries for electric planes or cars.

It’s hard to imagine that making stronger bolts in space can lead to better wind turbines but “by making bolts that are stronger than what can be manufactured on Earth, it’s possible to develop a larger, more efficient wind turbine that can create more energy.”

The possibilities are endless.