Factories in Space: The Next Industrial Revolution?

Factories in space may seem the stuff of science fiction, but top scientists think it might be more than just fantasy. A new "horizon scanning" report for the Royal Society predicts that the next 50 years could witness some radical breakthroughs in space manufacturing - think anything heat related being processed in space, like those massive data centres for example.

Why Space Factories?

Lower gravity is just one of the key advantages of manufacturing in space. Certain substances and medications can be made only, or made much more efficiently, in a weightless environment. For example, lower gravity enables the possibility of cleaner crystal growth or more precise layering of materials, with huge implications for industries like medicine and electronics. Within a few decades, orbital factories could be economically feasible to build in order to mass-produce such specialized products and ship them back to Earth.

But it's not just about manufacture. The Royal Society report also sees a future where AI data centres, which have a reputation for being power-hungry and heat-generating, would be relocated to space. By using the low temperatures and high solar energy beyond Earth's atmosphere, such space-based data centres would be capable of generating sustainably and efficiently.

Energy from Space

There's also the possibility of harvesting solar energy in space and transmitting it back to Earth. Solar panels in space could collect sun energy 24/7, all we need to do is figure out how to convert this into microwaves to beam it back to earth and figure out how to receive these and convert the beams back to usable electricity.

This may sound like the stuff of fantasy, but there are bods working on this stuff, and there's a lot of research done, so it could be here in the not too distant future.

Planning for the Future

Sir Martin Sweeting, who co-chaired the Royal Society's report, points out that while these ideas are speculative, they have some basis in actual science and engineering. "We're not trying to predict the future," he said, "but these are the sort of things that can occur.

I mean I don't think I'd classify myself as an optimist but this is the sort of thing that brings a glimmer of optimism to the fore: the prospect of the established space companies such as Space X actually doing useful deliveries to space factories for tangible social goods rather than taking celebrities on joy rides into space, now that's much more like it!

Posted Using INLEO