Factories in Space

A few years ago there were actually two companies trying to manufacture &quot;zblan optical fiber&quot; (which has better light transmission than normal optical fiber) in orbit: Made In Space, and FOMS. Both of their websites are tombstones now, afaik. The former was also attempting 3d printing in space, and was bought by Redwire.<p>Fascinating tech, but seemed to go nowhere.<p>There are now several &#x27;manufacturing in space platform&#x27; companies, like Varda. It&#x27;s not enough to just be a platform. There needs to be an actual killer app.

It would be ideal to also include the plans for orbiting data centres as well as satellite communication clusters in this very nice resource (since those are entirely _also_ necessary as part of manufacturing in space: alerting, measurement, telemetry, etc.)

&gt; We need new economic drivers for spaceflight. Something new and potentially bigger than any existing space industry such as telecommunications, remote sensing, launch and research. This is the missing piece to speed up development for the exciting Star Trek-like future. I believe in-space manufacturing will be the kickstarter and foundation.<p>Has this sort of thing actually worked out historically? I’d expect factories to be build in space if it was economically beneficial, and I’d expect cheap space flight to be a requirement rather than an outcome. We didn’t start working inside cities to justify busses, right?

Wishful thinking. Like Mars, on which we&#x27;d already be by now based on promises, but we aren&#x27;t getting anywhere closer anytime soon...<p>Meanwhile we&#x27;ve been losing the ability to make all kinds of stuff to China, or severely degrade the skills and expertise of the people in places like Boeing compared to the nerds that build the original planes in the 60s and 70s...

So not about Factorio: Space Age? nm.

But look at how hard it is to build a factory or a fab here on Earth...

The Current Market Size &lt;&gt; Timeline has &quot;Pharmaceuticals&quot;, specifically, &quot;space-grown crystals&quot;.<p>This has been tried for decades. It has not proved all that beneficial. Certainly not enough to be a clear economic advantage for doing more in microgravity.