Space manufacturing

Space manufacturing is the production of manufactured goods in an environment outside a planetary atmosphere. Typically this includes conditions of microgravity and hard vacuum. Manufacturing in space has several potential advantages over Earth-based industry.

The space environment is expected to be beneficial for production of a variety of products. Once the heavy capitalization costs of assembling the mining and manufacturing facilities is paid, the production will need to be economically profitable in order to become self-sustaining and beneficial to society. The most significant cost is overcoming the energy hurdle for boosting materials into orbit. Once this barrier is significantly reduced in cost per kilogram, the entry price for space manufacturing can make it much more attractive to entrepreneurs.

Economic requirements of space manufacturing imply a need to collect the requisite raw materials at a minimum energy cost. The economical movement of material in space is directly related to the delta-v, or change in velocity required to move from the mining sites to the manufacturing plants. Near-Earth asteroids, Phobos, Deimos and the lunar surface have a much lower delta-v compared to launching the materials from the surface of the Earth to Earth orbit.

During the Soyuz 6 mission, Russian astronauts performed the first welding experiments in space. Three different welding processes were tested using a hardware unit called Vulkan. The tests included welding aluminum, titanium, and stainless steel.

The Skylab mission, launched in May 1973, served as a laboratory to perform various space manufacturing experiments. The station was equipped with a materials processing facility that included a multi-purpose electric furnace, a crystal growth chamber, and an electron beam gun. Among the experiments to be performed was research on molten metal processing; photographing the behavior of ignited materials in zero-gravity; crystal growth; processing of immiscible alloys; brazing of stainless steel tubes, electron beam welding, and the formation of spheres from molten metal. The crew spent a total of 32 man-hours on materials science and space manufacturing investigation during the mission.

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