Ep. 685: Manufacturing in Space

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Fraser Cain [00:01:49] Astronomy Cast episode 685 Manufacturing in Space. Welcome to Astronomy Cast, a weekly facts based journey through the cosmos. We help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain, I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, Pam. How are you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:02:11] I’m doing mostly. Well, I. I have hit the time of the year where the dogs are out exploring in the yard and bringing in new and interesting things. Great time. 

Fraser Cain [00:02:23] Hunting. Ever hunting. 

Pamela Gay [00:02:25] Yeah. And. And so we’ve gone through the poison ivy phase. We’ve gone through the birds phase. We’ve hit the skunk. And strangely, the most toxic thing they have found so far is an orange rubber ball. Because I’m allergic to latex and rubber. And I picked the ball up and I was like, oh, put it back down too late. And apparently. Yeah. And and I had rubbed my face as well. And so now, like, half of my face is just sort of like, you are a moron. This half of my face is calling me names. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:01] Yeah. It’s like when you chop peppers, you forget, and then you’re like, go close your eyes. Like, oh, what was I thinking? Yeah, we have something similar. Our dog has got it’s allergic to something. And so I took it for a walk the other day and she came back, and then one of her paws puffed up. So she’s got, like, this great big doughy paw. Oh, yeah. And so she’s on steroids and and letting it shrink back down. But yeah, it’s it’s sort of like it’s comedically large. One of her feet and you’re just like, oh, poor pup. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:35] Yeah, yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:36] Launching satellites from Earth is counterproductive. I mean, you got to make a satellite that can handle Earth gravity, and then the brutal flight to space and then deployment in orbit. What if you could build your spacecraft in space? I am absolutely obsessed by this topic. So I just, like, want to warn people in advance that I am. A little. Maybe too obsessed. I have a. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:04] All right. 

Fraser Cain [00:04:04] The normal post-show rant might make its way into the show. So just keep that in mind. All right. All right. Yeah. But. Yeah. So this is this is great. So let’s talk about, like, go through, say, GW’s t old school launching a satellite. 

Pamela Gay [00:04:21] Oh, man. So, starting in the 1990s, probably actually starting in the 80s, people are like, we need this thing in space. And you proposed to NASA, and I’m just going to skip ahead and assume you eventually get the funding ten years later, right? You then start contracting out this company and that company, and they start sub awarding and stuff has to get shipped all over the place. So you have mirrors getting shipped from one place where they get mounted in the the support brackets that get shipped to another place where everything gets shaken and tested and gets shipped to another place for basically Chevy West. He probably got a platinum frequent flier card over the course of all of its adventures. Yeah, and then ultimately it got shipped through the Panama Canal all the way to French Guiana, where it was shipped into space many years later and had the bejesus shaken out of it in the process, which is by far, I think, the scariest process to a lot of us, because the first time they shook it, bolts fell off. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:34] Right. 

Pamela Gay [00:05:35] And then ultimately you end up with something in space that had to be super lightweight, because every pound costs a whole lot of money to ship into space. 

Fraser Cain [00:05:47] Yeah. I was talking to one of the project managers at GWC and they were saying, like most of the expense came from them shaving weight off of the satellite, that every bolt, every strut, every component, they had to redesign and redesign and redesign and keep knocking weight off it. It’s kind of like if you’ve ever done any hiking as an ultralight hiker, and you take every piece of your gear and you put it on the scale, and then you look at it again, you go, what if I cut off all the labels and you got all the labels and now you’ve saved yourself 30g, you know, you if you cut the grams, the kilograms will take care of themselves. Is that where the saying goes? And so they have to do that process with telescopes like JVC, I think has to fit within the fairing size of the rocket. And so that’s why you’ve got this gigantic space telescope fitting within the smaller fairing. It’s got a handle like Earth’s gravity, but it’s also got to handle space flight, which is not easy. 

Pamela Gay [00:06:47] No, no. And it has to survive all of the various changes in direction. It’s not like they can say this side up and it stays that way the entire time. It was in one orientation, going through the Panama Canal was in a different orientation prepping for launch. And anyone who’s did you know that that you can get a degree in packaging engineering? It’s a four year university degree, and no one who works in an Amazon warehouse has one, as near as I can tell, based on the way I receive things. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:25] But but in theory, like the people who are designing like like how the whole, like, some kind of appliance fits within its box. 

Pamela Gay [00:07:33] Yeah. Yeah. And how do you most economically ship the most of any one thing within this confined unit. And. With something like, do you need to actually get like all the types of engineers involved to figure out how you safely ship it? And it’s not an easy challenge. So there’s a whole lot of. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:58] Yeah, yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:07:59] Stuff that goes on. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:00] So let’s compare and contrast that with something that was actually assembled in space, the International Space Station. How’d that work? 

Pamela Gay [00:08:08] Slowly, because at the time it took a gazillion launches. But in the end, well, they had to be concerned about how much does any one component weigh? It wasn’t the we have to launch it all at once. So that you take up I know. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:28] You try to launch the. 

Pamela Gay [00:08:29] Mightiest space station ever. 

Fraser Cain [00:08:31] Yeah, like it was about 100 launches. Of the space shuttle, Russian launch vehicles, American launch vehicles. European launch vehicles. There’s a lot of plasma. Japanese? Yeah, there’s a lot of pieces that came together for that. 

Pamela Gay [00:08:50] And. And it’s with all of those different pieces coming together. And now they even have 3D printers on board. And they’re able to do a certain amount of creating what they need day to day, using this ability to do fabrication on orbit. 

Fraser Cain [00:09:09] Yeah. Well, we’re going to get to that later on in the episode. But I want to sort of focus on assembly. You know what? We’re going to take another break and I’m going to talk about this more in a second. 

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Fraser Cain [00:11:43] And we’re back! So let’s take that concept of assembling a space station. And how does that apply to assembling other missions in space? What does the future hold for this? 

Pamela Gay [00:12:01] So as we look to be able to put humans in a settlement on the moon, and I don’t mean like a settlement in terms of a colony where you’re likely to have children and pets. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:14] Right, right. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:16] Yeah, yeah. Think Antarctica. Except less air. Warmer. Sometimes colder. Sometimes. Both problematic. 

Fraser Cain [00:12:24] Dusty. 

Pamela Gay [00:12:26] Dustier. Sharper dust. Much sharper dust. So as we’re looking to be able to to build facilities where humans can survive on the moon, we don’t want to have to constantly be taking resources from Earth and shipping them to the moon. And this is where we start looking at in-situ resource utilization. And the idea is that depending on which world you’re at, there’s different resources you can use. We’re beginning to think that there may be ices that are energetically reasonable to release from the rock. So there should be ice that we can turn into water or oxygen and hydrogen without having to expand vast amounts of energy. We have done research on how do you take lunar dust and transform it into materials that you can grow plants in. How do you take lunar regolith and transform it into roads and launch facilities and cement, and essentially be able to get the things that you need to be able to survive? On the moon. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:43] And I mean, there are just practical limits as well to just the sizes and masses of things that you can launch from Earth, like you just like, say you want to build a bigger space telescope than you really can’t in a single launch. Like maybe you. 

Pamela Gay [00:13:57] Can. 

Fraser Cain [00:13:58] Fold something up inside a starship, but even that has its has its limits. If you want to build a 100 meter telescope in space, you’re going to need to build the thing in space. 

Pamela Gay [00:14:10] Yeah. 

Fraser Cain [00:14:12] And there are some amazing missions that have been proposed, things, you know, you’re talking about 3D printing. Like imagine a there’s there’s a company called, Made in Space. They they’re the ones who build a 3D printer on the International Space Station, and they’ve got a satellite that they’re designing called arc, not that will. It’s kind of like a spider, and it extrudes building struts out of it, but with a 3D printer and that sort of like, has its little grabbers, and it’s like pulling these struts out of its spinner rat, and then snips them off and then and then bolts them all into place. And then and then cook poops out a bunch of bolts and screws and then attaches them and then spews out another truss and attaches that. And you can imagine this single spider like robot diligently building this entire, space telescope in space. 

Pamela Gay [00:15:14] Yes, yes. And and what really gets to me is, as people are starting to think of, okay, how do we justify doing manufacturing in space? You you even have arguments being made, for instance, from the folks at Astro Forge, Galicia has said that manufacturing in space actually starts fixing problems that we have here on Earth, because mining on Earth is inherently polluting and dangerous. It’s still going to be dangerous in space, but at least you’re less the pollution part. It’s also a destructive process. So they see doing mining in space as being protective of the planet Earth. Then you start looking at, okay, now we’re not just going to be mining in space, we’re actually going to be manufacturing in space. And now you can start to make things you can’t make on Earth, because there’s certain materials that crystals you can grow in Zero-G that don’t have to have an attachment point the way they do in gravity. There there is chemistry that is just easier to do in vacuum in a Zero-G environment. And. Ultimately, manufacturing is seen as something that no one wants in their backyard. So instead of as unfortunately, has been happening forever, moving the manufacturing to more and more disadvantaged areas of the planet, just move it to space. Right. And so the out. 

Fraser Cain [00:16:52] There, nobody cares. 

Pamela Gay [00:16:54] There are people coming at this from both the we need this and this is NASA’s argument. We need to do manufacturing in space to make long duration occupancy of space possible. But we also need to do mining and manufacturing in space to protect the planet we live on today. 

Fraser Cain [00:17:15] Yeah. And in fact, NASA, I don’t know if you saw the news. NASA recently developed a new working group to bring in ideas about space, space manufacturing, assembly, and resource, utilization from space. So they’re starting to put some real budget behind. They’re starting to take in proposals and ideas, ways to address all of the different pieces of the puzzle of how they they build, launch, move, resupply, maintain, upgrade all of their, their technology in space. So let’s, let’s kind of imagine some sort of future space telescope. Well, what would we sort of imagine? This would come together utilizing space based resources as much as possible, but also stuff that might work with, you know, that you might need from Earth. So you want to build my 100 100 meter space telescope. 

Pamela Gay [00:18:15] So I am very grateful that you haven’t defined what wavelengths for working in radio or reading. Exactly. You read my mind. Yeah. Oh. So one of the the constant discussions has been, what if we put a giant radio telescope on the far side of the moon, which is not the same thing as a dark side, because the dark side is constantly changing throughout its orbit. But by putting it on the far side of the moon, we are getting out of the way of all of Earth’s radio noise. You can use a crater to define your structure, and then you have a nice easy ish in the grand scheme of things. Platform for building your parabolic or whatever shaped dish you choose and sticking all of the antennas out there, and then all of the relays back to Earth. You can imagine going via something out in L2. Perhaps there’s lots of ways to make it work. And by sticking it on the moon, you’re not dealing with re stationing it, you’re not dealing with having to try and maneuver it. It’s just there living on the moon. 

Fraser Cain [00:19:35] Yeah. There’s another mission called Far Side, which is unlike using an existing crater, they plan to just launch a satellite that will then build, or it’ll land on the far side of the moon, and then a rollout for rovers. And then each rover will put down ribbons of cable into the lunar surface, and then put out little dipole antennas that some set distance. And these will all be very, very lightweight. And then slowly just drive across the surface of the moon, laying out these dipoles in this giant, almost like flower petal or spiral form. And you’ll get this radio telescope. It’s really just ultra long frequencies. Yeah, exactly. The kind of thing that will let you see to the dark ages of the universal that you detect the magnetosphere of other planets. And it’s all done by trucks, little, you know, rovers laying down and building the telescope on the far side of the moon. And so you can really see this idea, like you couldn’t launch a tens of square kilometer telescope to the far side of the moon without this. What do you think is like holding us back from being able to move into this space based manufacturing future that we want starting costs? 

Pamela Gay [00:20:57] We we’ve seen multiple companies, Planetary Resources being the one that comes to my mind the most because they were so out in front of everything. There’s been a few companies that have been like, we’re gonna go mine asteroids. And then they’re like, no, we’re not right, have changed their working model. 

Fraser Cain [00:21:19] Or go out of business. 

Pamela Gay [00:21:21] Yeah, yeah. And and the initial startup costs for things like deep sea oil rigs are extraordinarily expensive. This is why people have only started trying to mine in the deep ocean once. A lot of the land resources that were easier to access, just became prohibitively expensive due to regulatory issues a lot of times. So if it’s expensive to put down oil rigs in the deep ocean, it’s going to be so much more expensive to go try and grab things from an asteroid. And you have to innovate all of the technology from scratch. And things as simple as welding are still getting explored after forge, launched about a month ago. Yeah, a cubesat with Astro Orb and their cubesat. We don’t have updates yet, but that’s not actually surprising for CubeSats. They have to wait for all of the SATs to spread out in orbit before they can really do a lot of effective work with them. But it’s it’s one of the many different things just trying to define the most effective way to weld and process in space. 

Fraser Cain [00:22:46] We’re in this really weird part. And here comes the rent. We’re in this really weird phase in, in our exploration of space where we still have this very sort of traditional system of you’ve got giant rocket. You build these spacecraft in clean rooms over a decade, shaving off the weight and making it fit inside the rocket fairing you test. He doubled his got to handle the rigors of spaceflight. All that kind of stuff. Yeah. And yet, as you say, there are all of these new ideas that are at various phases in the works. I’m seeing. There are tests of water powered rocket engines. There are experiments even on Mars. They’re making oxygen with the perseverance rover. So you’ve got the in-situ resource utilization. There are. And again, it would be if take hours for me to go through all of the interesting missions that are either in the works flying right now or, you know, in development that are going to be testing this out. And then you’ve got all of the ideas for assembling things in space. You know, the Lunar Gateway will be assembled in space. Yeah. And then all of the ideas for manufacturing stuff in space that there are NASA’s working on, on Earth, moving equipment that will gather up regolith on the surface of the moon, bring it to a place, break it down into its component parts. The European Space Agency is developing ways to to turn regolith into metals. So we’re in this really weird phase, but it feels inevitable. It feels like we will crack the code because the benefits are so great. Then it’s not about bringing this stuff back home to Earth. It’s about using this stuff from space in space. And I envision this future where we shift away from needing to launch almost anything off of the surface of planet Earth to support our growing space based infrastructure. And I think, you know, a lot of people are really focused on all of the launch providers, the Starship, SpaceX, you know, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if in just a few decades from now, almost everything that’s needed in space is supplied from space. You may still need to launch the the computer that sits inside the radio telescope, but you’ve built the rest of it from space based manufacturing, so our need to launch rockets will go down. It’ll literally just be people who want to fly to space. Everything else can be gathered up and assembled and and coordinated in space. 

Pamela Gay [00:25:19] And part of what is making all of this possible is the way both additive and subtractive, manufacturing machinery, machinery feels like too brutalist a phrase for some of the 3D printers are doing some of the most amazingly delicate work. And then they’re also out there, like building houses out of cement that look like they’re straight out of a children’s story because they’re these round, blobby, really cool, organic buildings. And then you have all of the modern CNC machines that you can basically give them a chunk of material, and they can make anything out of it. And these two different ways of manufacturing allow you to create just about anything. You just may have to snap the pieces together. And there’s robot arms for stuff like that. 

Fraser Cain [00:26:13] Yeah, the robot obviously does it. Yeah. You can you can get like there are Maker Labs. Yeah. That you can actually make almost anything in these labs. And the Maker Labs can make parts of the lab itself. Yeah. And so they’re now shipping around the world, these like bootstrapped versions of it. Here’s all the basic components. And then the first thing you do is you build all of the, all of the assemblies for all your 3D printers, everything that you require, all of the, you know, all of these, like a box of the of the parts. It can’t be built by the lab. And then you just bootstrap your way up to a fully functional CNC lab that can, yeah, fabricate almost anything you can imagine, which is really exciting. And then imagine taking a thing to space that, you know, you’ve got some future robot that goes to an asteroid and starts dismantling the asteroid for parts, building the pieces that it needs until till it bootstraps up to a proper factory to be able to create more supplies. It’s sort of sending stuff to the lunar colony, to other asteroids, to Earth orbit, all kinds of stuff. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:23] Yeah. And and if you want to, like, fully understand just what are the limits on this, the Baba verse books. 

Fraser Cain [00:27:31] Yeah. 

Pamela Gay [00:27:32] Are actually under there. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And and so we’re looking at a future where humans won’t so much be required to get their hands dirty in the manufacturing process and as, as is happening with so many different things that you and I have talked about this, this does start to run the risk of, well, there’s even. More jobs that are going to get handed over to the robots. So we’re looking at a very ethically complex future, but I think we’re just going to focus on the this is cool because look at all of the new science. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:17] This is science fiction future we were promised. 

Pamela Gay [00:28:20] Yeah, yeah. So we’re going to ignore the AI taking our jobs part and go with the barber verse. It saves our lives model instead. 

Fraser Cain [00:28:31] Let’s hope so. All right. Well thank you, panel. 

Pamela Gay [00:28:34] And thank you, Fraser. And thank you to everyone out there who is is supporting us in everything we do. You make this show possible. This week, I would like to thank, Burgo, Roland Berry, Gawain, Jeanette Wenk, Jordan Yang, Kyle. Kevin. Lyle. Mountain goat. Ray. Peron. Tony. I’m going to mispronounce names. I’m so sorry. Stephen. White. Andrew. Plasterer. Over a leper. Boogie net. Brian. Cagle. David. David. Pogue. Gerald. Schweitzer. Helga. Bjork, og and J-f Rosati. Thank you all so very much. 

Fraser Cain [00:29:24] Thanks, everyone, and we’ll see you next week. 

Pamela Gay [00:29:26] Bye bye. Astronomy cast is a joint product of Universe Today and the Planetary Science Institute. Astronomy cast is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license. So love it, share it, and remix it, but please credit it to our hosts, Fraser Cain and Doctor Pamela Gay. You can get more information on today’s show topic on our website. Astronomy. Cars.com. This episode was brought to you thanks to our generous patrons on Patreon. If you want to help keep the show going, please consider joining our community at Patreon.com Slash Astronomy Cast. Not only do you help us pay our producers a fair wage, you will also get special access to content right in your inbox and invites to online events. We are so grateful to all of you who have joined our Patreon community already. Anyways, keep looking up. This has been Astronomy Cast. 

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Show Notes

AstroForge (Company Website) (Animated background)

Off-Earth manufacturing: using local resources to build a new home (European Space Agency)

ISS Cargo Missions To Test Soyuz, Deliver New Science (Paywall) (Aviation Week Network)

Get ready, 3D printing may be coming to a planet near you (Paywall) (Washington Post)

NASA orders a 3-D printer/recycler for space station (Alan Boyle, Geek Wire)

Space station receives second of back-to-back cargo deliveries (Stephen Clark, Spaceflight Now)

3D Printing: Food in Space (NASA via Wayback Machine)

In space manufacturing and assembly (Airbus)

Microgravity manufacturing and R&D in space (Carsten Hirshberg, Ireen Kulish, Ilan Rozenkopf, Tobias Sodoge; McKinsey)

Crystallization of biological macromolecules from flash frozen samples on the Russian Space Station Mir (Stanley Koszelak, Cathy Leja, Alexander McPherson, 1996, Biotechnology and Bioengineering, Volume 52, Issue 4, Wiley Online Library)

Analysis of Selected Opportunities for Manufacturing in Space (B.W. Wahl of McDonnell Douglas Corporation, 1969, Space Congress® Proceedings, Space Technology and Society, Volume 2, Session 11; via Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University)