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Factories in Space
- yboris 3y agoSeems like 3D printing organs in space would be really useful and might make financial sense given their importance to people.
- bell-cot 3y agoAny particular reason to believe that "in space" would make 3D printing of organs substantially easier?
- pixl97 3y agoBecause gravity is a bitch when making squishy things. They like to collapse under their own weight before they can harden. Imagine a pipe that is rigid when fluid is flowing though it, but collapses and sticks together when none is present. There would be a massive amount of difficult in attempting to print/build said pipe under pressure. In zero gravity you don't have to worry about pressurizing it, but you do exchange a new set of difficulties.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> gravity is a bitch when making squishy things. They like to collapse under their own weight before they can harden. It’s much cheaper to master fluid suspension.
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- LispSporks22 3y agoI imagine a whole new wave of “innovation” for VC, it’s like Uber, but in space
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- jjoonathan 3y agoOh, there will probably be several booms and busts. Stocks will go to the moon, and then back to earth, and then to the moon, etc. So it goes.
- peteradio 3y agoLove the idea of factories in space. We need to separate the human from the supply chain interaction with raw and noxious materials and if we can do that in space we absolutely can terrestrially.
- 9dev 3y agoI guess all we need now is an Epstein drive …
- hef19898 3y agoOnly as a steping stone to Hoersch-Kessel ion engines. For FTL, I propose Kearny-Fuchida jump drives. Honestly, I just wanted to nerd out.
- giantrobot 3y agoI understood every word of that. We can be friends.
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- hef19898 3y agoAccepted! Funny, how easy it can be to retain those totally unimportant facts, isn't it? I credit my English to a huge extend to stuff like that, after almost all those books came in English.
- louissan 3y agowasn't there a quote in the soft cover Mechwarrior RPG saying something along the lines of "whatever happened to the Universe while Einstein wasn't looking?"
- hef19898 3y agoI'd have to take a look at my library to verify! I love the Kearny-Fuchida backstory so, they were basically ridiculed crack heads, until decades after their death people jumped to New Earth (?) on the THS Pathfinder (?).
- giantrobot 3y agoI don't see that quote on the cover of either 1st or 2nd edition of MechWarrior unfortunately. It does sound like something that would have been on some BT book however.
- zabzonk 3y agoi like the idea of factories in space - just doubt the possibility. for example, can you imagine constructing a modern chip fab in orbit? it's hard enough down here.
- ben_w 3y agoDepending on what you're doing, it can be easier. No need for a clean room for the chips or an ultra-hard vacuum chamber for your extreme-UV laser when you're already in the cleanest hardest vacuum around. I read somewhere that some specialist types of fibre optic cables already make sense to make in orbit just for the microgravity, but I don't know if that was a proposal to try it or if they already do…
- photochemsyn 3y agoAll the equipment would need to be radiation-hardened, though, and radiation-hardening is pretty expensive, although maybe easier in low-Earth orbit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening
- Majestic121 3y agoCould be the walls of the hangar to be hardened, not necessarily the whole equipment. I'm not sure if it would be less expensive though
- themanmaran 3y agoIt's just heavier that way. The easiest way to rad harden things is to stick them in a big lead box. But that's not ideal for shipping things to space. Alternatively I've seen some companies successfully rad-hardening from the software level. Effectively software that is tolerant to random bit flips.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> easiest way to rad harden things is to stick them in a big lead box Or work in a permanent shadow. Cosmic rays are easier to deal with than solar radiation.
- codetrotter 3y agoTotally expected this to be AI generated photos of factories floating in space before I clicked the link. Similar vibe to cats on keyboards in space, you know? https://www.knowyourmeme.com/memes/cat-on-a-keyboard-in-space https://www.knowyourmeme.com/memes/cat-on-a-keyboard-in-spac...
- mcphage 3y agoI was hoping it was a new game in the Factorio / Satisfactory genre :-)
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoOh my God please no. Zero-G Factorio would ruin my life, lose me my job and probably result in complete breakdown of human relationships.
- tomca32 3y agoWell there's Factorio Space Exploration mod which can easily take months to go through https://mods.factorio.com/mod/space-exploration https://mods.factorio.com/mod/space-exploration Sorry
- mdaniel 3y agoJust in case you weren't aware, Dyson Sphere Program (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Program/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Prog...) is Factorio in space and I actually prefer it for reasons I can't exactly articulate. It's labeled as Early Access but my experience is that it's more stable an fun than some "production" games I've played
- grepLeigh 3y agoCheck out "3D Printing in Zero G" experiments on the ISS for the origin story of space manufacturing: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Investigation.html?#id=1039 https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime... The company "Made in Space, Inc" responsible for creating the 3D printer, since acquired by Redwire. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_In_Space https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_In_Space
- Ciantic 3y agoWe have to start by assembling in space first. SpaceX's Lunar Starship is a little bit like that. They have to launch tankers to orbit and refill the lander. I can imagine someone making rockets from multiple separately launched parts that are then assembled in space. It would allow to use well tested rockets to launch smaller parts instead of trying to build a huge rocket at once.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> We have to start by assembling in space first You need to solve the material-cost problem first. Either a space gun / elevator or ISRU. Otherwise, assembling on the ground is cheaper for everything but the most massive objects. (At which point a constellation or fleet usually makes more sense.) > would allow to use well tested rockets to launch smaller parts instead of trying to build a huge rocket at once Bigger rockets have moderate economies of scale. Optimising for a particular launch vehicle doesn’t make sense in the long run.
- gshubert17 3y agoISRU - In-Situ Resource Utilization The farther humans go into deep space, the more important it will be to generate products with local materials, a practice called in-situ resource utilization.
- dotnet00 3y agoAt this point it isn't just SpaceX's Starship, but in general the direction Artemis is heading in, since the secondary lander design (from Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin et al) that was recently chosen also uses in-space refueling and is designed with Lunar ISRU in mind. Shelby finally retiring has been a great boon for NASA's human space exploration programs. Also, technically the Lunar Gateway would fit your second point, considering that it's split into a separate habitation module and power+propulsion element.
- Retric 3y agoWe’ve had space assembly for decades, just look at the ISS which both consists of many modules and used regular fuel deliveries to maintain orbit etc. Manufacturing seems possible but is several orders of magnitude more difficult because many processes on earth simply aren’t viable without access to earths vast array of manufacturing infrastructure, organic chemicals, or even gravity.
- birracerveza 3y agoIt would be awesome to have space elevators all over the globe and create a LEO network for factories and logistics. A man can dream.
- grawp 3y agoLEO is not accessible by space elevator at all. If you got off at ISS height you would just fall down. Good for basejumping though. And no you wouldn't even need heatshield, just rugged EVA suite.
- consumer451 3y agoI have always wondered if one could be strapped into a Falcon 9 fairing half and ride that down in an EVA suit. Coolest ride I can imagine.
- e_y_ 3y agoThe elevator itself would need to extend past LEO into geostationary orbit, but you should be able to get off the elevator in LEO space. As you're going up the space elevator, you would also be picking up horizontal velocity as you ascend. At ISS altitudes there would be enough atmospheric particles to slow you down once you got off, but it would take a while; probably on the order of years. Base jumping would not be a good idea.
- antisthenes 3y agoPretty cool website and concept, but unfortunately mostly a delusional pipe dream until we develop fusion-based propulsion that makes orbital travel dirt cheap. Here's a good summary of why it's mostly pipe dreams at the current tech level: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/exped...
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> until we develop fusion-based propulsion that makes orbital travel dirt cheap…here's a good summary The tyranny of the rocket equation describes the exponential fuel cost of lifting propellant, with propellant, out of a gravity well. One workaround is non-propellant launch [1], e.g. an orbital rail gun. (Fusion propulsion is still tyrannical because you’re carrying your propellant.) The other is in-situ resource utilisation, i.e. not lifting out of a gravity well. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch
- antisthenes 3y agoAh, yes. The response that just hand-waves a bunch of really hard problems or invents tech that doesn't exist. I get it, HN has a lot of tech-optimists, but these responses are very tiring. Has there been legitimate significant progress on orbital guns or space elevators since 2012?
- jandrese 3y agoWasn't the "super cheap fusion launch" predicated on discovering a non-Newtonian rocket engine? As long as you're suffering under the third law the idea of a super cheap launch is a pipe dream. This is also why concepts of reaching distant solar systems by maintaining 1G of thrust for the entire trip don't work. Plug the numbers for that into the rocket equation and even with absurd ISP values it requires more mass than is available in our solar system for a trip to even just Proxima Centauri. The only maybe possible exception would be to pump so much energy into your reaction mass that it gains a significant amount of mass from relativity, but even that is engineering in the "it's probably easier to build a space elevator" realm.
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y agoThis is Bezos vision (or the vision of the guy he paid to craft it for him) , anyway at least it gives some coherence to the space effort. When people are talking about living on Mars or on the Moon, sane people automatically categorize them as crackpots, whereas moving heavy industry in orbit with the help of automation at least sets a path for some sort of ROI which is not the ridiculous "hop in the rocket bro we are going to Mars lmao"
- bryanlarsen 3y agoNote that this is the end goal of Jeff Bezos and his company Blue Origin, who was a Gerard O'Neill groupie when they were both at Princeton. AKA "move dirty industry into space and make Earth a garden planet". Bezos does not expect to live long enough to see it happen, but he claims to want to put the building blocks in place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_K._O%27Neill
- cjbgkagh 3y agoI don’t understand how it’s even remotely feasible to move dirty industry into space? It’s hard enough to build industry on Earth. Where would the biproducts (dirt) go? Wouldn’t it be far easier to make factories cleaner on Earth? This sounds like someone who has now truly lost the plot.
- nickelcitymario 3y ago> Where would the biproducts (dirt) go? On the website, they suggest that these byproducts, i.e. waste, could effectively be dumped into space, where the solar winds would carry it out to the asteroid belt. I have no expertise to determine if this would ever be viable, but seems like they do at least answer this particular question of yours.
- cjbgkagh 3y agoI guess that could work, I did not think of that. Not sure if it greatly improves viability but venting into the solar winds I guess could be an option. At low earth orbit wouldn’t most material fall back down to Earth, it’s not like they’d be vending hydrogen. And a very high Earth orbit would incur even greater costs of getting material into space. It still seems bananas. Edit: I checked and solar wind starts at 60K km so there is no solar wind at LEO and 60K km is way beyond geostationary where it is already considered too expensive to bring things back to Earth.
- nickelcitymario 3y ago
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Benefits: Earth: Materials and products that can not be manufactured or are much better This is mostly guff from what I’ve seen, at least in the next hundred years.
- RC_ITR 3y agoOne of the things I've always been curious about - gravity is still very much exerting force on things in orbit, it's just that the object is moving along the perpendicular axis just as fast. For someone smarter at physics than me - I get why this 'feels' like weightlessness/0G, but does it actually have that impact when it comes to physical manufacturing? If it does, wouldn't terrestrial factories that have some sort of inertial roller coaster in them (akin to a vomit comet) be the cheaper/better answer? EDIT: I think a lot of people are missing the point of my question here. Remember, objects in orbit are accelerating because they are changing direction. This is different that being motionless in a far field with microgravity. But in practice, does that acceleration matter for physical manufacturing?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> the object is moving along the perpendicular axis just as fast Orbit is free fall. It’s equally correct to describe a falling object’s weightlessness as moving as fast as gravity. > get why this 'feels' like weightlessness/0G, but does it actually have that impact when it comes to physical manufacturing No, it’s the first postulate of Einstein’s theory of special relativity [1]. Free fall and the absence of gravity are as indistinguishable as acceleration and the its presence. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postulates_of_special_relativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postulates_of_special_relati...
- twic 3y agoKnown as the equivalence principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle In a curved orbit, that may be true at points, but for an extended object, tidal forces come into play: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_force
- TheFattestNinja 3y agoSlightly related: SMBC's guys have recently published a book on related topics, claiming it's got a lot of bibliographical research in it (disclaimer: haven't read it yet.) http://www.acityonmars.com/ http://www.acityonmars.com/
- neovialogistics 3y agoWouldn't delivery of products from factories in space to customers on Earth start to warm the atmosphere beyond our desired range directly - or at least as you begin to scale?
- grishka 3y agoI was just thinking that some manufacturing processes and research techniques require deep vacuum that needs very expensive equipment on earth, but comes for free and in effectively unlimited volume in space. Also we only need a small manufacturing-capable space station to build a larger space station out of materials mined from asteroids.
- twic 3y agoTo get deep vacuum, you either need a very high orbit, or one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_Shield_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_Shield_Facility
- dvh 3y agoShow me a prototype that works in Arizona desert, then I believe it.
- nickelcitymario 3y agoHow is that comparable? I apologize for this bit of sarcasm, but last I checked, Arizona has both air and gravity.
- jandrese 3y agoI think he's saying that if you can't do it in the desert then you shouldn't be talking about trying to do it in orbit. Work through the problems before you add in the launch costs and all of the other complications. This is also what I say to people who propose a permanent Mars colony. They should be re-creating the Biosphere project right now and making it a success before the rocket is ready to go. There are a lot of problems that are seemingly still unaddressed with the whole project.
- nickelcitymario 3y agoFair enough. But with a biosphere, that makes sense. Mars has gravity and an atmosphere, so a biosphere on Earth is a smart project to resume. I'm not saying we shouldn't test everything we can. We should, absolutely. But we also have to accept that the absence of gravity and operating in a vacuum are two major factors we could never adequately test on Earth.
- leashless 3y agoSurprisingly, I know a great song about this! Unexpected, I know. But https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFufOGZBwFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFufOGZBwFM try that for size. Isn't it beautiful? The well paced blips of the factory ships Slide past our orbit's brink Like a swarm of bees in the girder trees Come to our flowers to drink And the earth is clean as a springtime dream No factory smokes appear For they've left the land to the gardener's hand And they all are circling here
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agohttps://gradprograms.mines.edu/space-resources-graduate-program/ https://gradprograms.mines.edu/space-resources-graduate-prog...
- monkaiju 3y ago"This is the missing piece to speed up development for the exciting Star Trek-like future." Unbelievable misunderstanding of ST to think markets, or 'economic drivers' in their terms, would lead to anything like ST... The whole point of ST is that they are in communism or anarchism even. Nobody on the Enterprise was getting paid