“The benefit that we don’t talk about going to space for is you get away from all of the humans,” the CEO said, speaking on stage at the Space-Comm Expo in London on 5 March. Cardiff materials company and in-orbit manufacturing pioneer Space Forge aims to take advantage of that as it produces semiconductor substrates – the base material for electronic devices – in space.
“The last thing I want to introduce is a human into my manufacturing process, who has the opportunity to ruin what I’ve been making,” Western said. “[There] is a very well-documented history of astronauts who weren’t quite trained in the thing that they were responsible for, and the experiment or the product… was lost.”
That misanthropic perspective means Space Forge will not be installing its technology on commercial space stations, the boss said, and is instead developing and launching its own line of ForgeStar satellites. Currently demonstrating key technology in orbit, ForgeStar-1 is the UK’s first in-space manufacturing satellite.
Clumsy astronauts are far from the only challenge for the nascent in-orbit servicing and manufacturing (Isam) industry, which benefited from an announcement of £105m in public funding at the same event. Described by the government as “an emerging market where the UK has a strong competitive edge and opportunities to deliver significant commercial returns and strengthen national resilience,” Isam’s principal challenge is putting products in customers’ hands.
“Being able to reliably return these products to Earth is a huge challenge,” said Portia Bowman, founder and CEO of sustainability-focused space consultancy Growbotics, during the same panel discussion at the Excel London conference centre. Overcoming that hurdle will be vital for supply chain integration and competitive pricing.
But not everything that goes up will come down. Some products will remain in space to be used on other spacecraft, said the CEO, whose company produced a report on British Isam capabilities for the UK Space Agency (UKSA). “The complexity as to integrating that into the supply chain is harder, because it’s primarily autonomous,” she said. “You have to have the logistics from spacecraft to spacecraft, to be able to get it to the place that you need it.”
Congested space
In space, famously, no one can hear you scream. That same vacuum – providing an ambient pressure 10 trillion times lower than Earth’s atmosphere – removes contamination issues and the need for multi-stage pumps, according to Space Forge. Microgravity, meanwhile, prevents buoyancy to enable larger crystal formation and uniform alloy mixing, while temperatures near absolute zero allow ultra-fast curing without cryogenics.
Those enviable characteristics mean growing interest in Isam. As with all orbital applications, however, it faces the challenge of an increasingly busy environment. “Space is getting more and more congested. The regulations are evolving and changing, and I think that’s going to have a big impact on this,” Bowman said. Factories in low Earth orbit (Leo), for example, might be particularly visible and could face objections from astronomers.
Scaling up will be another massive hurdle. New re-entry vehicles will “unlock the market”, according to Jacques Fossey from BioOrbit, which plans to use space for protein crystallisation for on-Earth cancer treatments, but it will be permanent commercial platforms that make it economically viable. “You can leave all your heavy manufacturing equipment in orbit, and all you’re doing is taking the raw product up and bringing down the [finished] products,” he said.
Despite those significant challenges, the CTO was buoyant about the sector’s possibilities. “Space drugs will be here before you know it,” he told the audience.
The company planned to first demonstrate its system on the International Space Station in May, to better understand what the final commercial platform should look like.
Rocketing up the agenda
Isam is “very high on the government’s agenda,” said Jodie Howlett, senior project manager at UKSA – which has since merged into the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology – at the event. Identified as a “key capability area” for space, the field is expected to bring significant commercial opportunities to the UK, according to the agency.
Alongside work with BioOrbit and Space Forge, the government is also collaborating with OrbiSky on a study investigating the production of fluoride glass in orbit. That glass could be used in specialist ZBlan optical fibres, which can transmit light with up to 100 times less signal loss than traditional silica fibre.
“By backing these innovative companies to explore manufacturing in orbit, we’re positioning the UK to capture new markets and bring tangible benefits back to Earth – from better medicines to more efficient electronics. These studies demonstrate the government’s ambition to drive forward one of the most exciting frontiers of space technology,” said UKSA chief executive Dr Paul Bate in an announcement.
‘Mary Poppins from space’
Those tantalising possibilities are not yet within reach – so, for now, in-orbit manufacturing firms are focused on completing their latest technical milestones.
The week after the London event, Space Forge celebrated another important step as it successfully demonstrated operation of a high-pressure tank aboard ForgeStar-1. Manufactured by UK advanced materials company TISICS, the tank is a vital part of Space Forge’s Plasma Strike experiment. A previous demonstration confirmed that the extreme conditions needed for gas-phase crystal growth – a core building block of semiconductor production – could be created and controlled on an autonomous platform in Leo.
Focused on highly valuable materials such as gallium nitride, silicon carbide, aluminium nitride and diamond, Space Forge aims to underpin technologies including power electronics, advanced communications, quantum systems, defence platforms and high-performance computing. On Earth, development of the materials is constrained by defect formation, impurity incorporation and thermal instability during growth.
“Space offers a different pathway,” the firm said in an announcement. “The absence of convection in microgravity, the ultra-high quality vacuum with near-zero nitrogen contamination and the stable thermal conditions can enable semiconductor crystals several orders of magnitude cleaner than those produced terrestrially.”
Designed for compatibility with 14 different operational launch vehicles, ForgeStar satellites will work in orbit for two weeks to six months before returning to Earth. That re-entry will require a deployable, low-ballistic coefficient heat shield – or, as Western described it, “Mary Poppins from space – an inverted space-grade umbrella”.
The Welsh company is developing that system. In February, it also received a £300,000 UKSA contract for 2Forge2Furious, a study aimed at demonstrating how semiconductor seed crystals could be produced commercially in orbit. The project’s backers hopes those crystals could improve the efficiency, reliability and power density of high-power electronics, including telecommunications, data centre infrastructure, EV charging and quantum computing.
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Content published by Professional Engineering does not necessarily represent the views of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.