https://madeinspace.us/ https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Game-changer-This-Silicon-Valley-space-14379776.php https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_manufacturing#Products Manufacturing in space has a huge future. There are just too many advantages to space based design and manufacturing to ignore. Today, everything we design and build has to fit into the nose cone of a rocket. Then, it has to survive the acceleration and shaking of a rocket launch. Consider what this has meant to the James Webb telescope, which has significant folding in order to fit, and requires delicate structures that have failed shake tests. This same problem will exist for stuff manufactured in some other gravity well - it will have to fit inside a rocket and will have to survive the shaking it will receive. Plus, other gravity wells won't have the advantages of zero gravity and isolation of the manufacturing environment that space provides. These are serious engineering constraints. Beyond that, it's far easier and faster to reach a space based manufacturing platform from Earth than it is to travel to and land material on some other gravity well. As per the above links, this is being designed today. If there is some seriously needed material in some other gravity well, I can understand going to get it. However, all things being equal, it seems like space is the place for our off-earth manufacturing future.
I find it likely that sometime in the next few decades one of the SpaceX type companies will land on and begin utilizing asteroid real estate for industrial use. Materials as well as logistics/location will make this all but mandatory.
I don't see it so much. Unless building a starship is on the agenda. I mean really ...what is in space that isn't here? What would we need so much of we would have to mine it in space. But with negative mass..... if we can master it.... Opens up the stars. Even the shaking involved with a launch will likely be abolished.
And once we figure out negative mass/planck scale energy manipulation from the vacuum your point will have merit. Until then we deal with what we have.
I just don't see any money to be made in space manufacturing. Profit has to be considered... And space manufacturing has to be expensive.
Use your imagination and vision of that Starship you imagined....eventually everything used in space will be made in space and Asteroid Metals will be far less expensive and plentiful. Plus....No Pollution.
Manufacturing in space has the potential to drastically cut costs if there is a large scale up in production. However, manufacturing in space is extremely difficult for a variety of reasons. First, the availability of specialized materials is more limited in space. Second, without skilled humans and availability of huge custom designed machines, manufacture of precision parts are very difficult, and these precision machine parts are very important for spacecraft, safety, and fuel efficiency. There is a huge infrastructure and capital investment that would have to be built up in space, before manufacture was possible. It's expensive enough constructing a spacecraft on earth, imagine trying to do it on the moon with no air, and having to completely modify the entire manufacturing process because of the scarcity of certain types of materials on the moon. For manufacturing to become cheaper in space than on earth, there would have to be a huge scale up in production. That is, for building one spacecraft it's much cheaper to do it on Earth, but maybe if we were building a thousand spacecraft it might start making more sense to build them on the moon. Probably there are certain very specialized or precision lightweight components that would still be more practical to produce on Earth. It's the large weight materials that would be the most appropriate ones to try to build from natural materials in space. For example, maybe liquid hydrogen fuel would still be sent into space from Earth, but the heavier oxygen component of the fuel could be mined and separated from the abundant silica on the moon's surface. That would take a lot of energy though to break down the silica into oxygen.
I think we'll be doing manufacturing in space. Anything built on the moon would have to fit the size, shape and hardiness requirements for launches - a serious engineering challenge today. Plus, the advantages of no gravity, pollution safety, and easier access to other space bodies (especially Earth) exist in space rather than in a gravity well. Launching the James Webb telescope from a construction site in space (instead of the Earth or Moon) would have avoided all the problems that have caused it to be so monumentally delayed. Plus, it could have been built to be far larger and more powerful without the launch restrictions. Also, the OP links seem to indicate that humans may not need to be involved even in the near future - obviously a gigantic advantage. While being able to crack ice or otherwise find rocket fuel in our gravity wells is great, the removal of a requirement for launches is clearly more efficient - as is removing requirements for humans that come with so many necessities for survival.
Yes, I've heard that. Also, I've heard that zero g is a fantastic environment for making strands of some matrials with zero human involvement in manufacturing, including fiberoptic communictions lines. It could be worth shipping the material to space and then bringing back many miles of the stuff. I wonder if it would help in making carbon nanotubes, which have to be pretty much perfect to be used in various incredible ways.
The starship I imagined is the way to the stars. Chemical propulsion won't cut it. Without some kind of warp drive we will never reach the stars. They are just too far away.
The space elevator would solve a lot of problems, and would likely be easier to build from space to ground than it would from ground to space.
Maybe not..... well probably ... negative mass can also work as anti gravity. If I had any money.... or political power... I would hand pick a team to work on the problem. But alas.... just fantasy.
For now...thus my focus on current realities. https://phys.org/news/2017-04-physicists-negative-mass.html Personally I think that "Dark" Energies/Matter have something to do with it.
Have been thinking the same. I buy a lotto ticket every now and then (when it goes into the hundreds of millions) thinking of such things.
Isn't that the type of thing non-profit organizations are for? It would have to be a pretty big non-profit organization though. At least 80 billion, maybe 500 billion. (Just for some perspective, that would require 500 from every person in Europe combined with 100 from every person in China) And that would just be to get the industry started.
At the outset, manufacturing will probably be somewhat limited to assembly of parts created on Earth. There is a relatively small parts printer on the ISS now. Maybe we'll send up raw material and print stuff with a more capable printer, as it could be cheaper to send bulk raw material rather than the parts. Plus, I'll bet there will be parts we only make on Earth.
That would reall be cool! No rockets and their problems and limits! As I understand it, the limiting factor is a materials science issue - creating a cable strong enough. Maybe carbon nanotubes would work, but they have to be pretty much (totally?) perfect, which hasn't been achieved.
You are talking about manufacturing on an object that is rapidly leaving the Earth's area. Every day the asteroid would be traveling away from Earth, which would increase the fuel consumption needed to get back, that sort of thing doesn't increase on a gradual scale but nearly exponential scale depending on the distance. An orbiting object could return resources on a regular schedule based on the closest distance to the nearest station or ship...
