Experts Extol Potential Benefits of In-Space Manufacturing

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland — Artificial retinas and tissues, spacecraft parts, semiconductors — these are just some of the things that AI-enabled robots could create in space, according to industry experts who are looking at how to scale up advanced manufacturing in orbit to improve product quality and boost sustainability on Earth.

To usher in a new era of in-space manufacturing, the mindset within the space industry must shift to view gravity as a manufacturing tool rather than a constant, Jessica Frick, research engineer at Stanford University and leader of three active International Space Station National Laboratory programs, said at the recent TechConnect World conference.

While in-space manufacturing offers numerous benefits that will improve the quality of advanced materials, there is more experimentation and research to be done before it can be carried out at scale, Frick said. In fact, the space sector has “barely scratched the surface” of using microgravity as a manufacturing tool.

“It was only about the ’70s [when] we started exploring using microgravity as a manufacturing tool,” she said. “And since then, there’s only been a few thousand experiments in low-Earth orbit compared to the billions of experiments humans have done under gravitational force.”

Humanity has always been “defined by its ability to manufacture certain materials,” and industry experts believe that microgravity is the new tool that will usher in the next material generation or age, Frick said.

“We know for a fact that microgravity manufacturing has been shown to benefit a range of materials, from carbon-based polymers to semiconductor layers,” Frick said. The current focus is figuring out how to manufacture materials in space at a large scale.

Ultimately, materials depend on the manufacturing process. Factors that impact and alter the manufacturing process and the quality of materials produced can be likened to a toolbox, Frick explained.

“In this toolbox is temperature, vacuum, pressure, [oxidation-reduction] reaction, reaction time, materials, things that we’re used to,” she said. “Gravity has been a tool in this toolbox all along.”

Gravity manifests itself in several different physical phenomena, and these are “incredibly important” for materials manufacturing on Earth, Frick said. Gravity should be considered a part of the toolbox in a similar way to vacuum: vacuum is the absence of matter, and the absence of gravity impacts manufacturing processes and products, thus it is also a manufacturing tool.

There are manufacturing processes that can be conducted in either zero gravity, meaning no gravity, or microgravity, meaning minimal gravity, environments that cannot be replicated on Earth, even in simulated environments, Danielle Rosales, senior director of commercial strategy at Space Tango, said at the conference.

“When you remove the force of gravity, you’re working within that new stressor. That means that the equipment and the hardware we’ve designed works differently than what we’re used to in our typical lab environment,” she said. “This also means that we can think differently — that things that were once a restraint no longer have to be.”

In-space manufacturing can be likened to a “productive collision,” S. Sita Sonty, CEO of Space Tango, said at the conference. While some collisions cause destruction, others can unlock value, produce insight and reveal answers.

“When you have this unique combination, this productive collision of liability, redundancy, reusability, optimization of weight and size, precision, adaptability, flexibility and automation that’s intelligent, what happens?” she said. “That’s what enables the mastery of manufacturing, and I would argue [that] we’ve unearthed answers in orbit that we can actually apply to more efficient manufacturing processes.”

Manufacturing advanced materials in environments of microgravity or zero gravity enables “superior structural properties,” capable of impacting a plethora of industries and products, Sonty said.

For example, 3D printing in space has the potential to change biotechnology. When it comes to printing artificial tissue, gravity proves to be a major problem, Olivia Holzhaus, founder and CEO of Rhodium Scientific, said at the conference. The lack of gravitational forces enables the layered structures to be higher quality, more homologous — similar in their structure, physiology or development — and more homogeneous — having corresponding parts, similar structures or the same anatomical positions.

“You’re essentially getting a better product, and you’re able to do fine structures like tissues, like retinas, very delicate tissues that on Earth, when you get the first couple of layers, they’re collapsing on top of each other,” Holzhaus said. “So, in microgravity, you’re able to do those fine structures to completion because there’s no gravity coming down upon them. There’s no settling, there’s no differentiation and thickness.”

The same concept applies to completely different industries like computing, Holzhaus said.

“In terms of semiconductors on the electronic side, when you’re spraying and coating in microgravity on Earth, the same thing happens, the deposition and the settling because of the gravity environment,” she said. “So, when you’re looking for a chip that is precisely one nanometer thick and it has to have a few layers in it, you want every layer to be basically homologous and homogeneous.”

With in-space manufacturing and 3D printing biological, physical and chemical materials in micro or zero gravity, AI and robotic automation must be a part of the process, especially when the goal is commercial viability and accessibility, Holzhaus said.

Putting human operators in space is extremely expensive from both a resource perspective and an engineering perspective, so implementing quality assurance and quality control standards enables workflows to go from benchtop to space and back to the manufacturing laboratory in a more efficient manner, said Noah Gladden, lead integration and manufacturing engineer at Arkisys.

“You don’t want to wait on an operator for every step of your manufacturing sequence every time we do it,” he said. “Because of that, we see long-duration robotic platforms as a near-term enabler for manufacturing in space, especially when you’re thinking about planning for scaling up manufacturing.”

For autonomous operation, these manufacturing platforms will have to have robotic and optical systems built into them, as well as “modular interfaces for upgradability, if it’s going to be long-term,” Gladden said.

“And then depending on the nature of the robotics that you’re using in your manufacturing system, a platform might need changeable end effectors — some for manipulation, some for manufacturing and some for quality assurance — and there will almost assuredly be a high amount of autonomy built in to run these processes without an operator in the loop,” he said. “Beyond typical fault tolerance verification, artificial intelligence systems could be a potential solution as long as they’re properly trained, of course.”

In-space manufacturing can also be utilized to lower waste, energy consumption and carbon emissions and improve overall sustainability on Earth, Partha Dutta, chief technologist at United Semiconductors, said at the conference.

“By using materials [made in space] to reduce waste, you’re going to reduce the stress on mining, because then you’re going to be utilizing materials more efficiently because of the quality of materials,” Dutta said. “But more importantly, you can also reduce the energy consumption that is today used [for] industrial technologies for device application and processing.”

If advanced materials are grown, printed or manufactured in space with higher-quality properties, that affects device design, which translates into processing technologies that will save a lot of energy, reduce the amount of materials that are needed and reduce the need for mining and purification, Dutta said.

“If you look at the entire supply chain and value chain, you’re impacting a lot of different industries — all the way from mining to waste stream to energy and all of that,” Dutta said. If “you’re making materials that I think would be really beneficial to grow in space because they cannot be done here on Earth for many reasons, suddenly we start actually simplifying … processing technologies. And that is where we see the highest impact and biggest bang for the buck for space manufacturing.”

Though in-space manufacturing has been discussed for a long time by academic and scientific experts alike, it hasn’t been done at scale yet. There are numerous limitations, the biggest of which is access to space itself, Sonty said.

Launching payloads is still expensive and gaining access to platforms like the International Space Station remains difficult, she noted. Transportation and load weight also pose a serious challenge, she added.

“It’s not [like] you can take pallets and pallets of components and then build them. You have to optimize for weight and size,” Sonty said. “Because we in the space industry have had to do this already for as long as the [International Space Station] has been up there and as long as other space transportation vehicles have been being used, that’s forced us to actually unlock better processes for manufacturing.”

Though in-space manufacturing cannot be currently carried out at scale, the space sector is at an “inflection point,” Sonty said.

“You have not only the promise of, but the actual, beyond minimum viable product, fielding of … commercial launch vehicles. So, fundamentally we can have more rides and make more stuff and break more stuff in space,” she said. “That’s why we haven’t been able to answer this question of, ‘How do we manufacture in space at scale?’ yet, because we haven’t had access as much. As that’s shifting, we can actually answer that question about the scalability of manufacturing in space.”

Sonty said: “At the end of the day, automated manufacturing processes in orbit will enable repeatable methods, precision, automation and agility. … Let’s emphasize together what are some forward-thinking strategies to diversify that space economy, so that everybody can benefit from what we learn.” ND