Space is a dangerous place for humans: Microgravity sets our fluids wandering and weakens muscles, radiation tears through DNA and the harsh vacuum outside is an ever-present threat.
Space is a dangerous place for humans: Microgravity sets our fluids wandering and weakens muscles, radiation tears through DNA and the harsh vacuum outside is an ever-present threat.
But for materials that show incredible strength, transmit information with barely any loss, form enormous crystals or even grow into organs, the harshness of space can be the perfect construction zone.
As the cost of spaceflight goes down, more of these materials may become cost-effective to make or study in space. And soon, more and more people might be carrying around objects built off the planet.
"We generally make things by subjecting them to a different environment," said Andrew Rush, president and CEO of Made In Space, an in-space manufacturing company. "We make food by cooking it in fire, heating it up and causing chemical reactions. We make steel by heating things up at high temperature and maybe, depending on the steel, [in a] high-pressure environment. We can quench things; we can make things cold to make different materials or improve on those materials.
"Really, space-enabled materials are just another version of that, but instead of throwing something in a furnace and heating it to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit [540 degrees Celsius] or something, we take it to space," he told Space.com.
In space, microgravity lets materials grow without encountering walls, and it allows them to mix evenly and hold together without traditional supports. And a nearby ultrahigh vacuum helps things form without impurities.
Free fall
The International Space Station is falling at a constant rate around the Earth, which everyone on board experiences as a lack of gravity; on the station, you're always in free fall. That environment, called microgravity, comes in handy for growing things that need to expand evenly in every direction or avoid the contamination of touching an enclosure's walls.
Microgravity is of particular interest to people who create materials for miniaturized devices and computers, researchers told Space.com.
"Demand for high-tech solutions requiring higher resolutions, faster processors, more bandwidth, greater precision, novel materials, unique alloys, innovative processes, higher energy efficiency, more processes in a smaller volume and more sophisticated tools in general are pushing materials and processes for manufacturing to the point that defects at the atomic- and molecular-level matter," said Lynn Harper, the lead of integrative studies for the Space Portal partnerships office at NASA's Ames Research Center in California.
Building in microgravity can reduce those defects. The first major candidate for making money on something made in space today, a special type of fiber-optic cable called ZBLAN, is a good example: When manufactured in microgravity, the thin cable is less likely to develop tiny crystals that increase signal loss. When built without those flaws, the cable can be orders of magnitude better at transmitting light over long distances, such as for telecommunications, lasers and high-speed internet.
The fiber is light enough — and can demand a high enough price — that sending the materials to manufacture it in space may be able to pay off commercially. Made In Space sent a microwave-size machine to the space station in December to test making at least 300 feet (100 meters) of the cable, and another company is also developing a space station test payload. (Researchers mentioned a third with technology on the way, too.)
"One of the challenges for making money from space manufacturing is, it's still quite expensive to launch things to space," Alex MacDonald, senior economic adviser within NASA Headquarters' Office of the Administrator, told Space.com. "You're still dealing with thousands of dollars per kilogram. So, whatever you are going to be making in space that you're going to be sending down to Earth has to be incredibly valuable but also available per unit of mass."
"The reason they're doing this is the huge payout, which would be in billions of dollars if you can actually draw the fiber at least an order of magnitude better than silica," Dennis Tucker, a materials scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama who has researched ZBLAN glass for decades, told Space.com. "There's a lot of potential applications if we can do this. Fiber amplifiers, there's lasers for cutting, drilling and surgery … infrared imaging, remote IR."
"I'd just like it to turn into the first real space-based industry," he added.
As the cost of sending things to space continues to decrease, experimenters can envision a number of other scenarios in which the space station environment could be key to manufacturing.
For instance, a substance called gallium nitride, used to make LEDs, is difficult to solidify in large amounts at a time because its two constituent molecules don't always bind perfectly in order, leading to defects. Reducing the movement of the melted fluid as hotter and less-dense fluid rises, which occurs because of gravity, can decrease those defects — as can preventing the highly reactive substance from touching the sides of its container, according to Randy Giles, chief scientist at the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space. Someday, substances like that could benefit from in-space creation.
The Electrostatic Levitation Furnace, a device that the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency operates on the space station, is an example of the kind of setup that could avoid a container altogether, Giles said. The furnace can melt and solidify materials while levitating them in place using electrodes.
Experiments performed years ago using NASA's now-retired space shuttle orbiters also have provided reasons for optimism. Researchers pulled a stainless-steel disk called the Wake Shield Facility behind the shuttle, creating a vacuum in its wake that's 1,000 to 10,000 times emptier than what is possible on Earth. Experimenters used this cleaner vacuum of outer space to make thinner, purer samples of materials like semiconductors. (A large proportion of semiconductor components made on the ground end up being rejected because of impurities interrupting the matrix of atoms.)
Building for space
Another source of excitement for in-space manufacturing is building things for space that will never be constrained by the pull of Earth's gravity — or the crushing push of a rocket launch.
The International Space Station already harbors 3D printers, which Made In Space has used to produce tools right on the space station. But the company's vision is much grander: Large-scale structures, like space telescopes or solar panels, could be printed in space instead of being folded up to launch into orbit. And visitors to other worlds could someday use the resources locally available to print shelters and other components, traveling only with the digital blueprints.
"To me, the exciting part is looking at everything around me as potential feedstock to make new stuff, and that mindset and that paradigm shift has huge implications," Niki Werkheiser, NASA's in-space manufacturing manager, told Space.com. "Whether it be in situ resources, our food, foam, plastic bags, whatever's around us, I'll look at that as, how can I reuse or recycle? And it does require combining and understanding not only the machine's capabilities, but the materials' qualities and properties for what you need to make."
But whether microgravity-based materials research looks into building for Earth or for space, this area of investigation is making strange and wonderful things that have never been seen on the ground at those quantities or of that quality.
"There's so much potential to do things in this area now that we weren't able to do before, and it's not just dreams and ideas now — it's happening," MacDonald said. "There are facilities on orbit that you can use and you can think about improving, and you can think about developing your own facilities. It's a little like small satellites were 10 years ago. People could see that it was very exciting, and we were beginning to do experiments, but I think the really exciting stuff is still to come."
But for materials that show incredible strength, transmit information with barely any loss, form enormous crystals or even grow into organs, the harshness of space can be the perfect construction zone.
As the cost of spaceflight goes down, more of these materials may become cost-effective to make or study in space. And soon, more and more people might be carrying around objects built off the planet.
"We generally make things by subjecting them to a different environment," said Andrew Rush, president and CEO of Made In Space, an in-space manufacturing company. "We make food by cooking it in fire, heating it up and causing chemical reactions. We make steel by heating things up at high temperature and maybe, depending on the steel, [in a] high-pressure environment. We can quench things; we can make things cold to make different materials or improve on those materials.
"Really, space-enabled materials are just another version of that, but instead of throwing something in a furnace and heating it to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit [540 degrees Celsius] or something, we take it to space," he told Space.com.
In space, microgravity lets materials grow without encountering walls, and it allows them to mix evenly and hold together without traditional supports. And a nearby ultrahigh vacuum helps things form without impurities.
Free fall
The International Space Station is falling at a constant rate around the Earth, which everyone on board experiences as a lack of gravity; on the station, you're always in free fall. That environment, called microgravity, comes in handy for growing things that need to expand evenly in every direction or avoid the contamination of touching an enclosure's walls.
Microgravity is of particular interest to people who create materials for miniaturized devices and computers, researchers told Space.com.
"Demand for high-tech solutions requiring higher resolutions, faster processors, more bandwidth, greater precision, novel materials, unique alloys, innovative processes, higher energy efficiency, more processes in a smaller volume and more sophisticated tools in general are pushing materials and processes for manufacturing to the point that defects at the atomic- and molecular-level matter," said Lynn Harper, the lead of integrative studies for the Space Portal partnerships office at NASA's Ames Research Center in California.
Building in microgravity can reduce those defects. The first major candidate for making money on something made in space today, a special type of fiber-optic cable called ZBLAN, is a good example: When manufactured in microgravity, the thin cable is less likely to develop tiny crystals that increase signal loss. When built without those flaws, the cable can be orders of magnitude better at transmitting light over long distances, such as for telecommunications, lasers and high-speed internet.
The fiber is light enough — and can demand a high enough price — that sending the materials to manufacture it in space may be able to pay off commercially. Made In Space sent a microwave-size machine to the space station in December to test making at least 300 feet (100 meters) of the cable, and another company is also developing a space station test payload. (Researchers mentioned a third with technology on the way, too.)
"One of the challenges for making money from space manufacturing is, it's still quite expensive to launch things to space," Alex MacDonald, senior economic adviser within NASA Headquarters' Office of the Administrator, told Space.com. "You're still dealing with thousands of dollars per kilogram. So, whatever you are going to be making in space that you're going to be sending down to Earth has to be incredibly valuable but also available per unit of mass."
"The reason they're doing this is the huge payout, which would be in billions of dollars if you can actually draw the fiber at least an order of magnitude better than silica," Dennis Tucker, a materials scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama who has researched ZBLAN glass for decades, told Space.com. "There's a lot of potential applications if we can do this. Fiber amplifiers, there's lasers for cutting, drilling and surgery … infrared imaging, remote IR."
"I'd just like it to turn into the first real space-based industry," he added.
As the cost of sending things to space continues to decrease, experimenters can envision a number of other scenarios in which the space station environment could be key to manufacturing.
For instance, a substance called gallium nitride, used to make LEDs, is difficult to solidify in large amounts at a time because its two constituent molecules don't always bind perfectly in order, leading to defects. Reducing the movement of the melted fluid as hotter and less-dense fluid rises, which occurs because of gravity, can decrease those defects — as can preventing the highly reactive substance from touching the sides of its container, according to Randy Giles, chief scientist at the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space. Someday, substances like that could benefit from in-space creation.
The Electrostatic Levitation Furnace, a device that the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency operates on the space station, is an example of the kind of setup that could avoid a container altogether, Giles said. The furnace can melt and solidify materials while levitating them in place using electrodes.
Experiments performed years ago using NASA's now-retired space shuttle orbiters also have provided reasons for optimism. Researchers pulled a stainless-steel disk called the Wake Shield Facility behind the shuttle, creating a vacuum in its wake that's 1,000 to 10,000 times emptier than what is possible on Earth. Experimenters used this cleaner vacuum of outer space to make thinner, purer samples of materials like semiconductors. (A large proportion of semiconductor components made on the ground end up being rejected because of impurities interrupting the matrix of atoms.)
Building for space
Another source of excitement for in-space manufacturing is building things for space that will never be constrained by the pull of Earth's gravity — or the crushing push of a rocket launch.
The International Space Station already harbors 3D printers, which Made In Space has used to produce tools right on the space station. But the company's vision is much grander: Large-scale structures, like space telescopes or solar panels, could be printed in space instead of being folded up to launch into orbit. And visitors to other worlds could someday use the resources locally available to print shelters and other components, traveling only with the digital blueprints.
"To me, the exciting part is looking at everything around me as potential feedstock to make new stuff, and that mindset and that paradigm shift has huge implications," Niki Werkheiser, NASA's in-space manufacturing manager, told Space.com. "Whether it be in situ resources, our food, foam, plastic bags, whatever's around us, I'll look at that as, how can I reuse or recycle? And it does require combining and understanding not only the machine's capabilities, but the materials' qualities and properties for what you need to make."
But whether microgravity-based materials research looks into building for Earth or for space, this area of investigation is making strange and wonderful things that have never been seen on the ground at those quantities or of that quality.
"There's so much potential to do things in this area now that we weren't able to do before, and it's not just dreams and ideas now — it's happening," MacDonald said. "There are facilities on orbit that you can use and you can think about improving, and you can think about developing your own facilities. It's a little like small satellites were 10 years ago. People could see that it was very exciting, and we were beginning to do experiments, but I think the really exciting stuff is still to come."