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Optical fibre made in orbit should be better than the terrestrial sort
- ovi256 8y agoI'm glad to see this evolution become true. It's such a trope in SF literature that it's been the plot trigger of the latest Andy Weir novel, Artemis.
- fredsir 8y agoWhich is a great book, by the way, that I highly recommend anyone who likes science, space and, a good heist, to read.
- neilsimp1 8y agoSeconded. The main character came off a lot like Mark Watney from The Martian, but what a great, quick read Artemis was.
- aaronblohowiak 8y agoAlso an Excellent listen, the voice acting is superb.
- bayesian_horse 8y agoManufacturing in space could have a lot of applications... but it's such a pain to get stuff into orbit and back.
- adrianN 8y agoThat's why you capture an asteroid or mine the Moon.
- phpnode 8y agoI'm imagining a giant spool of optic fibre made from lunar regolith being wound back to earth directly from the moon
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoI was imaging a module on ISS feeding cable out direct to the surface of the Earth (impossible as ISS isn't geostationary). ISS is 400km high apparently, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-Optic_Link_Around_the_Globe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-Optic_Link_Around_the_... is 28,000km for comparison. Perhaps with your plan we could put a giant spool at one of the poles and auto-wind it!
- Robotbeat 8y agoSpaceX intends to get costs down to about $10/kg to LEO using BFR, almost as cheap as long haul air cargo. That is 2-3 orders of magnitude improvement and changes a lot of calculations.
- bayesian_horse 8y agoThe next calculation is how LEO transfers affects the environment/climate over the long term, when you begin using it as much as long haul air cargo...
- Robotbeat 8y agoNot likely.
- hwillis 8y agoIn this case, they say a km of fiber is worth $1 million+. A 125 micron fiber weighs about 32.4 grams per kilometer, which costs $55 on a Falcon 9. So 20,000x less than the sale price.
- baldfat 8y ago> It is a glass, made from a mixture of the fluorides of zirconium, barium, lanthanum, aluminium and sodium, that is therefore known as ZBLAN (sodium has the chemical symbol Na). Acronyms!!! I know it is weird to bring this up but there is no NA in ZBLAN! It is AN and doesn't represent Sodium. Would be neat if we could find a bunch of cases like this and give reason why we can expand into space manufacturing and a moon base. I doubt we will see this in our life times. I just can't see the financial benefit unless it is 100% automated.
- rovek 8y agoThey seem to be using Na as a justification for using N, since the other chemical symbols don't match the acronym either. Unless they're just using the first letter of each symbol, either way it's not a great name.
- chrismorgan 8y agoIf you use the Latin name for sodium, it flows much more clearly: ZBLAN: Zirconium, Barium, Lanthanum, Aluminium, Natrium. My grandmother, who was a pharmacist, prefers to call it natrium rather than sodium. I don’t know if there are any industries or similar where it’s commonly called natrium. The sentence would have read better if the aside had instead been rendered “(sodium is also known as natrium)” or similar.
- jacobush 8y agoSome languages use natrium instead of sodium.
- yorwba 8y agoI did some statistics on the translations at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sodium#Translations https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sodium#Translations Of 107 unique language-word pairs (some languages have multiple words for sodium) there are 53 starting with [nNнν], all of which are some variation of natrium (they are in 51 languages because Icelandic and Roman have two variants each). Likewise, there are 37 starting with [sṣ], all of which are some variation of sodium. The remaining 17 are either different or no transliteration is available to check.
- nicktelford 8y ago> To say that this is truly an economic process is cheating slightly, since the ledger fails to account for the trivial matter of the $100bn or so spent to build the space station in the first place. The ISS is a laboratory, I don't think it's fair to consider its cost as a factor here in the same way you don't consider the cost of the University campus for other research. I highly doubt they'll be doing full-scale manufacturing on the ISS. They'll be using it (as it was designed) to conduct experiments on their technology and prove that it can be done. Only then will the real investment will begin where they construct dedicated manufacturing facilities. I wonder if this would be an opportunity for Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable modules?
- HeadsUpHigh 8y ago>I wonder if this would be an opportunity for Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable modules? Not just Bigelow but many other space startups. SpaceX is dominating the news atm with Blue Origin to follow but the reality is that the big bucks are in space activities not space transportation. This is only now starting to be realized with companies deploying fleets of cubesats for Earth observation but in the next decade there are plenty of companies that are looking to build commercial space stations. Some of these projects are more conservative, like using technology proven on the ISS coupled with cheaper components and more streamlined operations. These 2 factors combined with the fact that these are not cost plus contracts with the government mean at least an order of magnitude of cost savings. Then there is Bigelow who wants to move to the next stage of inflatables but also the Gateway foundation who want to launch the materials in space and assemble a huge station there. Everybody is waiting for the price per kg to drop to a certain threshold and then cheap human transportation to be made available. Crew Dragon is probably the first step towards that that might enable some small station but the big deal is BFR( when and if it launches).
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> the big bucks are in space activities not space transportation This is an opinion, not a fact. They are presently in transportation. Moreover, the space mining and manufacturing pitch has been made (incorrectly) for at least forty years. I have yet to see a convincing business model for any of these activities, even assuming cheaper launch costs.
- mooreds 8y agoI remember reading "The Third Industrial Revolution" [0] in my childhood, which was a paean to all the different industrial processes that would be possible in space. One that I remember was alloys of metals with vastly different weights (lithium and lead, for example). In gravity it's hard to mix them perfectly because the heavier metal sinks, but that is not an issue in space. Would be fun to read it again and see what predictions, if any, came true. 0: https://www.amazon.com/third-industrial-revolution-Harry-Stine/dp/0441806643/ https://www.amazon.com/third-industrial-revolution-Harry-Sti...
- antt 8y agoGiven that there is no industry in space I'd guess none.
- mooreds 8y agoWell, there have been industrial experiments, which may have helped industry down here.
- abecedarius 8y agoI dimly remember that that book presumed launches would get much cheaper and more frequent. To be fair, before the shuttle flew there'd been inflated promises, and aerospace had progressed really fast in the preceding decades. It was a little like someone in 2000 thinking Dennard scaling wasn't about to hit the wall -- it's easy to think that was dumb in hindsight.
- village-idiot 8y agoFinally, that particular sci-fi trope is becoming real.
- verelo 8y agoI suspect one day, in a distant future, we will discuss the issues of manufacturing with external forces ie gravity, and how only the best products can be made in environments we 100% control.
- crispyambulance 8y agoI reached my "article limit" for the month, but it makes me wonder, HOW MUCH better could optical fiber be if made in zero-gravity? Presumably it's all about material purity and accurate/consistent geometry of the fiber itself and the doping profile for refractive index cross-section. If it were "perfect" how much better would the fiber be? Double the reach? So you cut in half the cost of repeaters/re-generators on long-haul links. Those are definitely expensive, but I think space flight is quite "up there" in cost too.
- close04 8y ago> zero-gravity There's a common misconception that LEO has zero gravity. You're barely off the ground so to speak and gravity is almost the same as on the surface. The difference is that you're constantly falling so you experience weightlessness. So you are experiencing zero-g, not 0 gravity. You'd be hard pressed to go anywhere with an absence of gravity acting in that spot. This being said the question is if the quality increase justifies the price (even for a hypothetical future mass implementation). Plenty of products get incremental upgrades, it doesn't have to be a massive jump. Again, if you can justify the cost.
- amluto 8y ago> So you are experiencing zero-g, not 0 gravity. You’re doing it, too. “g” is the acceleration due to gravity. Heck, scientists call drop tower experiments “microgravity” — it’s much less of a mouthful than “really quite a good approximation of free fall”. [0] And if you believe in general relativity, LEO is a perfectly valid reference frame with no acceleration due to gravity (ignoring drag) but plenty of second order effects thrown in. [0] I spent a summer at NASA’s Glenn Research Center doing microgravity combustion experiments studying how combustion is affected by the absence of gravity. I say that entirety unapologetically.
- close04 8y agoI was under the impression that zero-g is the accepted terminology for when you experience free fall (in orbit, in an elevator). Is that wrong? Regardless of terminology, I tried to highlight the fact that floating in space is not due to the absence of gravity as many people assume. You're experiencing about 90% of the gravity at the planet's surface just that everything else around you is accelerating along with you.
- thinkcontext 8y agoIs it known if ZBLAN can survive re-entry stresses?
- hwillis 8y agoInside a capsule? Sure, no problem. The issue with gravity is only during the very brief period when it is cooling from molten to glass phase.
- dsr_ 8y agoIf the cooling can be done sufficiently quickly, it would be cheaper to make this stuff using a technique that Corning (maker of about 13% of all glass fiberoptics) has used for quite some time: producing it at the top of a tower and letting it drop and cool in free fall.
- hwillis 8y agoGot a link?
- hwillis 8y agoAccording to the originating NASA/UAH paper[1], where they took a fiber-making machine into their microgravity-simulating plane, gravity causes tiny amounts of convection inside the molten fiber. That's why you can't just float the fiber on air or something. Their guess is that the convection creates tiny little circular currents in the glass that are really excellent at causing crystal nucleation. The core problem is that ZBLAN glass needs to be cooled down very quickly to solidify in the amorphous state. Drawing a fiber demands that you do it quite slowly to get a quality, consistent fiber. Drawing is not a technology that is going to improve hugely any time soon- it's too fundamental. Instead you need the microgravity to give you a little extra time to draw the fiber to the required quality. [1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8087775_Effects_of_Gravity_on_ZBLAN_Glass_Crystallization https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8087775_Effects_of_...
- TheRealPomax 8y agoI think I'm missing a key piece in this article: it does not seem to explain why current fiber would be bad enough to need this, given its already incredible carrying capacity, even with loss due to imperfections and unintentional impurities. Without this, this just reads as "some people want to burn money for no good reason, yet again demonstrating that vanity non-problems are what gets you the headlines". Maybe it is, maybe it's not, but the article doesn't seem to clarify.
- fpoling 8y agoThe current fiber requires multiple amplifiers across the ocean. The space fiber may allow to get away from it making it much easier to lay and maintain transocean cables.
- TheRealPomax 8y agoWhy would amplifiers make it harder to lay cable? You generally don't want one giant uninterrupted piece of cable over huge distances, even if it's a perfect cable, exactly because that makes it easier to do maintenance.
- walrus01 8y agoFrom the perspective of an ISP that buys a lot of many different types of singlemode fiber optic cable: This is cool and all, but we care about dollars per meter for cable purchase orders. Until the cost per kilogram of launching stuff into orbit is drastically reduced (think: massive fleets of 100% reusable BFR-sized rockets sending stuff into LEO on a regularly scheduled basis), I don't see how this will have a real world application outside of special non-profit, government funded R&D projects.
- mrfusion 8y agoAny idea how gravity is the limiting factor in producing this? The article mentions stress. But why?
- Terr_ 8y agoThat reminds me of ZAFO (Zero Attenuation Optical Fiber), a plot-devices in the book Artemis by Andy Weir.
- barbegal 8y agoThe $1 million per km figure is of course complete rubbish. That's just the cost scientists have had to pay to fabricate it using the zero-g plane. There is no commercial application where the demand is that high. The best commercial application for this type of fibre is a transatlantic crossing. In these applications typically 4 to 8 fibres are used and the distance is 7000km so the total length of fibre is around 50000km. For this sort of application the fibre cost needs to come in at around the $100 million dollar mark which is just $2k per km. To create a single km of cable in ZBLAN you need about 300g of feed-stock. So the revenue per kg is around $6k. This is below the current cost of around $10k per kg cost of sending payloads to orbit.
- walrus01 8y agoThe cost of the raw ultra low loss single mode fiber (9/125 on a spool) for a transatlantic crossing is negligible, it's the cost of the cable when it's fully integrated as a cable with jacket, copper for repeater power, etc. And then the bulk of the cost is actually the massive engineering project that involves repeaters, possibly branching units, cable ships, ROVs, plows, divers, beach work, cable landing stations. I would guess that the fiber strands are way less than 2% of the total capex spent.
- djbelieny 8y agoSPOILER ALERT: Sounds like the plot of the sci-fi book Artemis by Andy Weir. Great Book and there's also a kick ass Audible version read by Rosario Dawson
- gamesbrainiac 8y agoThis is quite interesting, the plot of Artemis by Andy Weir which is basically about a company trying to make fibre-glass in space might actually seem plausible.
- lucb1e 8y agoAndy Weir and Daniel Suarez have a habit of using things in their books that you see on the news as new technology two weeks or months later. It's a little scary sometimes to see one of Suarez' thrillers show up in real life, and it takes me a bit to adjust to it being real without the dystopia.
- gwillz 8y agoCareful there, spoilers.