A Space Inflection Point: Is Commercial In-Space Manufacturing Really Still a Science Fiction Story?

Watching SpaceX catch a rocket the size of a 20-story building in midair continues to bring into sharp focus a world-changing fact. The commercial space market is rapidly innovating and cheaper. Launching new ventures in space is becoming a far more realistic proposition and giving validation to the once science-fiction concept of In-Space Manufacturing (ISM). ISM is traditionally split into three categories: Space-for-Space (SFS), Space-for-Earth (SFE), and Space-for-Surface (SFU) (items manufactured in space for other celestial bodies such as asteroids or the Moon).

ISM is not necessarily as new as readers might think, with the Skylab mission begun in 1973 performing manufacturing experiments with an equipped materials processing facility. Similarly, in 1969, Russian astronauts performed in-space welding experiments. However, these missions were government led with a heavy research focus, aligning weakly with the traditional ISM categories of SFS, SFE, and SFU, and not undertaken with strong commercial objectives.

While ISM has historically been serviced by the government, commercial companies are starting to serve this sector, such as Space Forge and Voyager Space, which recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to drive new possibilities for manufacturing products in-space. The agreement brings together Space Forge’s ForgeStar satellite and Voyager Space’s significant Research and Development (R&D), payload design, and orbital capabilities experience. The ForgeStar platform sits between 500 Kilometers (km) and 800 km in orbit, providing unique manufacturing conditions such as reduced gravity, vacuum, and extreme temperatures. The reusable payload can then be returned globally, with targeted re-entry supported by the company’s proprietary automated algorithm, Aether.

Commercial ISM has the potential to revolutionize a range of industries, most notably those of semiconductors, pharmaceutical, and materials manufacturing.

Semiconductor: Microgravity allows for a range of benefits in the semiconductor production process such as increased yield and product quality. This is especially impactful for the consistent production of thinner chips. A primary challenge of producing thinner chips is being able to effectively layer the materials perfectly on such a small scale. This is difficult on Earth, as materials settling are impacted by gravity, making it far more difficult to achieve uniformity for these thin chips, whereas in space, without the presence of hydrostatic pressure, the relative density of different materials has no impact, thus allowing for greater precision of the chip layering process. Therefore, ISM could help open the door to consistently producing far thinner chipsets of higher quality, such as 1 Nanometer (nm), which would be far more challenging to do terrestrially. The opportunity to improve the manufacturing process of these smaller chips is a significant economic benefit for companies and a huge strategic opportunity for governments.

Furthermore, ISM offers a far cleaner production environment, with the opportunity to leverage the vacuum of space, which is cleaner than any terrestrial environment, reducing the likelihood of contaminants landing on chips, which would then reduce yield or product quality. Finally, crystal formation is far more efficient when done in microgravity, not only increasing the overall yield, but also quality with better uniformity and structure.

Pharmaceutical: The primary value to the pharmaceutical market comes at the R&D stage of the product process. The increased radiation in space compared to Earth increases the chance of cell mutations and growth rates, resulting in a higher chance of developing new drugs and biopharmaceuticals. Given the fact that pharmaceutical companies already spend a fortune on drug research, there is no reason that space companies cannot capture some of this funding, offering improved success rates for innovation and new compounds, cutting product development timelines. One key element to note for this type of R&D process would be the impact on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other pharmaceutical regulatory bodies, likely resulting in a significant shift in the development, test, and review processes before going to market. This could represent a significant roadblock to the commercialization of ISM pharmaceutical products.

Materials: The presence of gravity causes buoyancy, which prevents completely perfect alloying of different density metals. Without it, materials manufacturers would be able to improve the quality and consistency of alloy creation. Furthermore, in-space production provides the opportunity to produce alloys that cannot be achieved on Earth.

Additional benefits of ISM that are universal across industries include:

• Being able to leverage extreme temperatures that can be challenging to produce and maintain on Earth, especially low temperatures. In-space processes that require near absolute zero are far easier to achieve.
• Reduced emissions—not only does the efficiency of the production process in space reduce the amount of resource usage, as products are made more efficiently, the production process can be powered using solar power.

There are obviously still many hurdles to overcome before ISM becomes a staple for many industries. Cost has, and still remains, the primary challenge to address with this type of production. Launching payloads is extremely expensive; launching to Low Eart Orbit (LEO) ranges from US$3,050 to US$140,000 per KG (see ABI Research’s SatCom Constellations: Launch & Network Deployments market data (MD-SATCC-103)). However, the space sector is at an inflection point, and as launch costs continue to decrease, this challenge is being eroded. Cost-benefit analysis on the improvement in product quality and yield rates from ISM against launch costs needs to be consistently conducted by manufacturers to effectively capitalize on the competitive advantages brought by these production processes.

Government support will be critical, especially to address the cost issue, with the Chinese government already making notable headway. The commercial space industry has been written into this year’s Government Work report for the first time, and several provinces are pushing the growth of the sector by introducing development policies and establishing industrial parks/bases. Long-run government legislative support and subsidies can help de-risk private investment and encourage industry activity. This could be highly compelling for both the United States and China, especially for their respective semiconductor markets, with the development of higher quality and thinner chipsets representing a notable geopolitically strategic advantage.

Industry leaders in the semiconductor and biomedical industry need to form strong strategic partnerships with space companies to continue to drive the potential of ISM. While this is unlikely to have any significant short-term impact on companies’ business prospects, the medium-to-long term upside for businesses that invest in this could be unparalleled. Creating significantly thinner and smaller chips of higher quality more consistently could massively shift market share dynamics, or the invention of proprietary medicines that simply cannot be replicated terrestrially could lead to almost uncontested market share. Market leaders such as NVIDIA, TSMC, AMD, and Qualcomm for semiconductors and Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca for pharmaceuticals should look to identify strategic opportunities associated with ISM. Alternatively, the ISM market space is open to being dominated by savvy space companies that vertically integrate with manufacturing processes, utilizing their extensive knowledge in space operations and strong control over the value chain to optimize cost and production processes. These companies could either be produced through close partnerships with leading manufacturers or through targeted strategic acquisitions.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotic automation will obviously be a critical part of ISM. Putting human operators in space is extremely expensive from both resource and engineering perspectives, alongside creating potential contamination for production. Technology vendors will be the third piece of the partnership puzzle, alongside space companies and manufacturers. Bringing together solution portfolios that can support End-to-End (E2E) lights-out production in space will be no easy feat, and something that will take technology vendors time to accomplish, working with in-space manufacturing companies to design best-of-breed solutions for this industry. This is something that companies need to be investing in developing, not for success in the next 5 years, but for the next 20 years. If you had suggested 20 years ago that the commercial market would have reusable rockets, most of the world would have laughed and said it was a pipe dream for bored billionaires to spend their fortunes on. Now, SpaceX is a standout market leader in an industry that will be worth trillions.