Here’s a nice survey of advances in orbital manufacturing. What goes unsaid is that this further obviates the need for heavy-lift systems.
3 thoughts on “Making In Space”
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Here’s a nice survey of advances in orbital manufacturing. What goes unsaid is that this further obviates the need for heavy-lift systems.
Comments are closed.
A very nice summary of MIS advances, indeed! I had not known of the casting tech. Their work is highly desirable.
The even better news is that they are not alone. SpiderFab, by Firmamentum, a subsidiary of of Tethers Unlimited Inc., has a deal to build large structures in GEO.
http://www.tethers.com/PR/Dragonfly_PhI_PressRelease.pdf
If these firms can be the beginnings of competition for manufacturing on-orbit, we might well see them move outward to the LLO base now sought from some as the beginnings of a Lunar Return, or better yet, to an EML-1 station.
If the government took commercial space seriously, we would have long ago had an industrial park in orbit where dozens of companies were doing production and research. Not with astronauts but actual manufacturing engineers.
Soon, we wont have to depend on the government to provide such a facility.