Made in Microgravity

How space manufacturing might make products better

Gravity does a lot for us. It keeps our feet on the ground, and it keeps us in orbit around the sun at a nice, comfortable distance. And it sure is nice to walk out at low tide and see how far off the beach you can get. But when it comes to manufacturing, gravity is holding us down. It turns out a lot of products might be better if we made them in space, so that’s what a host of manufacturers are setting out to do.

Chips in Space

Space provides manufacturers access to the biggest clean room of all. There’s a near-vacuum in the void of space, and without gravity forcing them in one direction, particles that might cause impurities in a finished product simply aren’t there. With getting people and materials into space becoming cheaper and cheaper, space manufacturing is viable for a growing number of industries.

With sales approaching $750 billion annually, the semiconductor market is one that might especially benefit from space manufacturing. First, there are the hyperclean conditions. Secondly, the vacuum in space means manufacturers can have fewer gases clogging up the intricate mechanisms of semiconductors, allowing for thinner layering. This could yield denser, more powerful chips while using much less energy to make them.

Defense contractor Northrop Grumman is partnering with UK startup Space Forge to test in-orbit chipmaking.

“In-space manufacturing is an area we think is going to grow massively in the next few decades, so we’re very keen to work with them,” David Pile, regional director for Northrop’s space business sector in the U.K., Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, told Defense News. “Given how many electronic systems we build across the company, there’s loads and loads of applications where this is possibly a game-changer.”

Manufacturers are excited about the opportunities space provides to make new products, improve existing ones, and cut down production times.

“Space is a much better place to do almost any industrial process,” Space Forge CEO Joshua Western told the Guardian. “We live on a planet where we’re weighed down by gravity. We made ovens, refrigerators, and the vacuum pump to help manufacture products on Earth, but if you go to space, you get those benefits for free.”

High in Fiber

Fiber optic cables are particularly sensitive to impurities. The ZBLAN glass they’re made from is fragile, and as it cools, it makes crystals that can disrupt performance. In the microgravity of space, however, the crystals don’t manifest, allowing for long strands of fiber optic cables.

“Parabolic research showed that optical fibers produced in microgravity can be higher quality than those made in normal gravity, and the International Space Station provides a potential platform for commercial production of these fibers,” NASA said.

Astronauts used hardware from FOMS and Mercury Systems to produce more than 7 miles of optical fiber on the ISS, producing commercial-length fibers in space for the first time.

“With each new generation of hardware, we bring innovative changes to the microgravity fiber manufacturing process. Validating those improvements on parabolic flights helps us learn even more and succeed,” said Avinash Vasudevan, Director of Systems Engineering at Mercury Systems.

Redwire owns and operates a commercial additive manufacturing facility on the ISS for government and commercial customers. The optical fibers it produces there are the first commercial products to be manufactured aboard the ISS and sold commercially on Earth.

The company also sent back to Earth this spring another important first. It bio printed living cardiac tissue in space, where microgravity can make it easier to replicate the 3D structure of natural tissue, Payload Space reported.

“These are extraordinary scientific achievements that bring us closer to reliable, large-scale commercial biotech services in orbit,” Redwire in-space industries president John Vellinger said.

They could lead to the most important function space manufacturing will play in terrestrial life.

Out of This World Pharmaceuticals

Those crystals that can screw up fiber optic cables can also affect pharmaceutical drug production. Astronauts on the ISS working on behalf of Merck discovered that the crystals in cancer drug Keytruda come out smaller and more uniform in space than they do on Earth, making them easier to deal with. Bristol Myers Squibb researchers hope space-manufactured drugs will be easier to store. Space-based drug R&D can improve success rates and make manufacturers more likely to invest in experimental drugs that might yield medical breakthroughs.

Manufacturing in microgravity can make it easier to formulate life-saving drugs in pill form rather than liquid that needs to be injected. It can also make dosage much more patient-friendly, reducing the number of doses they’ll need on a daily or weekly basis.

“We have a fundamentally unique way of manipulating chemical systems that physically cannot be done on Earth, because gravity is a fundamental force,” Varda Space Industries co-founder Will Bruey told Wired. “That’s the source of our value.”

Varda is looking to establish automated manufacturing facilities in low-Earth orbit. The ISS has been home to nearly all the space manufacturing research conducted so far, but it will be retired and brought back to Earth in 2031, and companies are racing to build the next space factories.

“Imagine there’s one office park now where all of the work and research has historically been performed,” S Sita Sonty, CEO of Space Tango, told the Guardian. “After 2030, there may be four or five of them. That gives us opportunities to leverage research and development in microgravity and perform more of it at scale in orbit.”

Once space manufacturing scales up, perhaps products will come with a Made in Microgravity label.