Next Generation Space Industries

The Current Order

The economics of Space today dictate that any product from space must have three common factors. The product sent to Earth must be low mass and high value, and the hardware to generate the product must not be prohibitively expensive to launch and operate. As of today, the only products that fit those requirements are photons, or photons turned into digital signals. For this reason, as of 2022, almost all space businesses are focused on either communications or Earth Observation, with the observation of things other than Earth mainly being carried out by NASA.?

In a world where Starship is operational, this will be different.?

With the cost structure lower, the difficulty of emplacing hardware will drop, and thus the array of downstream products can increase. In short, it can become viable to not only send photons down to Earth but sending atoms down can become a viable business case.??

This cost shift does not mean that the criteria are out the porthole as it were, but it does shift the bar a bit. The atoms brought down to Earth must have high value and low mass. This means a high cost density. Photons sent down still have value and, as they carry no mass, have the highest relative value. Still, the door is open to sending raw materials up to LEO and other possible locations, performing value-added work on them, and sending finished goods back to Earth. These goods are mostly the product of intense, precise operations and, as such are highly data-driven. Most of these will require on-orbit compute to achieve the efficiency and quality needed to justify the premium that will still be associated with space operations. Their raw materials will originate on Earth, but as the supply chains become established, ISRU will offer the opportunity to use space-based resources as feedstocks for Earthbound products. Some of these operations will occur in LEO and others will occur in MEO, GEO, and beyond.??

High-Value Density Space Goods

Any manufacturing that occurs in space must meet a few criteria. Materials made in space must come from Earth sourced feedstocks at least initially, so less material brought up is better. While the ideal is to return less material to Earth, those models which require returning material must minimize the masses and volumes. This process will be expensive at least until ISRU is fully matured, so the finished product must be of high value. In short, goods produced in space must be small, dense, and valuable.?

If these three conditions are met, the cost (still considerable) of taking raw materials up and finished products down can be recouped.?

• Space Based Solar Power (SBSP)

In 2020, the Earth generated and consumed 2.8 Terawatts. This is a lot, but we also used a significant amount of energy that was never electricity to power cars, ships and planes. The global energy industry was valued at $50bn in 2020 and should be double that by 2030. While more energy production is more sustainable than before, what if it didn’t even occur on the Earth?

SBSP has long been considered unrealistic due to the high costs of building the infrastructure. Solar is one of the few pure photon business cases in this list. It is, of course, cost-prohibitive with current launch costs, but with heavy, frequent, affordable launch, the math changes. SBSP, at scale, technically counts as a megastructure. In deployment, it resembles Starlink. A Starship class ship deploys several independent satellites, each with a compact solar array rolled up, maybe like the Redwire The Roll-Out Solar Array (ROSA). Each satellite will deploy several football fields worth of solar panels, and a few weeks after launch, it will add its output to the already existing constellation. With these sizes and the sheer number of satellites, LEO does not make sense. Particularly since latency is a nonissue and platforms will be in service for decades at least.

This distributed power generation grid has three use cases.?

One up, one down, one that doesn’t move.?

SBSP can be beamed down to the Earth or satellites in other orbits. For Earth beaming, GEO offers the quality of a given satellite being stationary relative to the Earth’s surface. A satellite deployed to collect and send power to a specific location will stay over that location as long as it functions, requiring little stationkeeping. This use case is most attractive in areas where it is otherwise difficult to build conventional power generation facilities. Regions with insufficient sun or wind places where a sensitive environment makes new power plants undesirable places where populations are climbing the prosperity ladder rapidly enough that power becomes a bottleneck for further development.??

For satellite to satellite power, beam steering facilitates the transmission, and MEO might be a more attractive option. This could be provided to satellite operators on a SaaS model, as power infrastructure would facilitate faster, cheaper satellite construction.?

There are a lot of power-intensive operations that will occur in space, and those could benefit from megawatts of power on the station. Here, we see things like massive data centers, metal, and ceramic smelting and refining, as well as other work that we cannot see yet. For this case, the solar array could be dedicated to a specific use or even attached to the platform that does the work.?

It is also worth noting that SBSP is the very first example of viable ISRU since solar power is a resource that is used in situ or sent to where it is needed.? In the future, solar panels can be produced from mined minerals found on the Lunar surface and asteroids. These locally produced solar panels will be used on those surfaces and ultimately be placed in orbits to send the power to other locations around the solar system.?

• Telescopes

While many atom-based products will make sense, so will many photon-based products. The Hubble telescope is at an altitude of 550km, so it could easily be reached by the Space Shuttle. With a frequently flying Starship, a Hubble or giant class telescope is feasible, and an undisturbed orbit is attractive. This will be a data-intensive operation, and significant compute will be a definite advantage for on station analysis, processing and compression.?

Also, if one telescope can be built, so can ten or one hundred In LEO, GEO, all the Earth Lagrange points, and beyond. These telescopes can study different parts of the spectrum and do work from mapping asteroids, to searching for other civilizations to seeing the earliest moments of Creation.?

• Orbital Assembly And Manufacturing (OSAM)

OSAM is a precursor to many other large-scale technologies. It facilitates many follow-on capabilities by providing infrastructure to ease their operation and maintenance. With OSAM capabilities, large structures can be assembled from flat packs, expanded, repaired, and modified. This capability also ties into ISRU as the stocks that initially came from Earth can be replaced by supplies that originate on the Moon or asteroids.??

• Research

Autonomous laboratories will happen, and due to their data being produced and consumed locally, the need for continuous high volumes of data sent to the Earth are significantly reduced. This means that latency ceases to matter for this use case. Further, these facilities, both crewed and uncrewed, exist to take advantage of microgravity, and that gravity is disturbed when the station/satellite has to maneuver to avoid other satellites or stations. In this scenario, the finished good is usually intended to stay in space and not return to Earth. It is far easier to find empty orbits in MEO or GEO than in LEO.?

• Crystallography

Research and later manufacturing done in space will cover a great many different disciplines, but one core technology will unite many of the early efforts. Crystallography is the study of crystal structures and their behavior and formations. Crystallography ties into metallurgy, optics, ceramics, medicine, and other verticals. With microgravity, crystal formation can be manipulated, and imperfections can be either avoided or introduced when and where they are desired. These crystal formations can take moments or months, depending on the application. This can deliver tougher, lighter metals and ceramics, clearer optics, and lifesaving drugs. The key thing in making it work, though, is the need for long-term physical stability. This means a minimum of maneuvering, including pointing. Researching and producing crystal structures at scale is a data-intensive process with lots of telemetry. That means it needs significant compute capabilities on station and likely on-demand as a hybrid orbital cloud infrastructure.?

• Photolithography for semiconductor chips

Chip fabbing at the cutting edge nanometer range has two significant obstacles to scaling. One is optical diffusion. The best way to combat this is with a vacuum. The best terrestrial vacuums are orders of magnitude worse than opening a hatch in space. The other obstacle is vibration. By having a spacecraft without moving parts, this other obstacle can be overcome. This process could lead to chip fabbing in space for the very smallest resolution chips that cannot be produced on Earth at scale.??

• Human organ 3D Printing

One of the difficulties in printing organic structures is the difficulty in keeping the cells where you put them. Gravity causes things to shift over the weeks needed to grow an organ. Preliminary results on the ISS have indicated that microgravity can increase the ability to keep cells where they need to be. This can lead to an organ industry in orbit, providing sufficient shielding is included to reduce radiation levels for the growing organs. Cells and feedstock are sent to the facility; the organ is grown and brought back to Earth on a low g reentry vehicle such as the Dreamchaser delivered to a waiting patient for transplantation. Dreamchaser can be landed in any city in the world with a hospital capable of organ transplant.?

• Genetics

For reasons that need not be elaborated on, there are entire classes of genetics and virus research that are best carried out off the Earth. Crewed, occasionally crewed, and uncrewed space stations are the safest path. If a station is intended to be uncrewed most of the time, then by necessity, it is a robot filled with robots.

• Space Hotels

The Overview Effect is often cited, and most of us have experienced it as part of commercial air travel.?

You can go higher with a balloon flown by Space Perspective and see the world from 30km. You get a better view still from Blue Origin today with a height of 100km. Several people have already flown to orbital space and more are on the books.?

That is today, and there are several space stations in the world in the works. They are currently all planned for LEO, and customers seeking new experiences will flock to them.?

And then, they will want a still newer experience.?

Hundreds of people have seen the ISS view, and any new stations will be in the same orbital plane as the ISS so that the view will be the same.?

As a person reaches GEO, the view of the Earth will be different. You will no longer feel like you are standing over the Earth. It will not fill the viewscreen anymore. You will be far enough to see the stars well when you look away from the Earth.?

The attraction will be in seeing a newer, more rarefied view. For this reason, as well as stability and safety, MEO and GEO will be desirable locations for space hotels.?

Space Tourism might not be considered of benefit to Humanity, but it is. Tourism is an industry that treads lighter on the land than resource extraction and many other sectors in less developed places. It also supports other pieces of the infrastructure and logistics chain necessary to support the following link in the chain.?

Building Industry in Space for Earth

In order to move more of our industrial processes off the Earth and into space, the transition must be economically viable and of benefit to humanity to garner and maintain support for this and subsequent steps. Easing the constraint of building power generation, restoring sight and life to people, providing faster computers, and expanding our minds with a greater understanding of the Universe will all benefit humanity. These steps will build the infrastructure necessary to make the subsequent advances and move us forward to more fully embrace our destiny and carry light into the darkness of space while lessening the impact humanity has on the Earth itself.?