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Humanity's Biggest Machines Will Be Built in Space (popularmechanics.com)
When rockets can no longer hold oversize payloads, building in space might be the best way to go. Popular Mechanics: Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Made In Space is working to make that dream a reality. For the past few years, they've operated the Additive Manufacturing Facility, one of the only 3D printers in space. While the AMF sits comfortably aboard the International Space Station, Made In Space has plans to launch a new printer that would operate exclusively in the vacuum of space. Their prototype, called Archinaut, is scheduled to launch later this year. Future machines like Archinaut will be able to print nearly everything in orbit -- where there's no limit on size. "We can manufacture a structure that couldn't support its own mass if it were on Earth," says Made In Space CEO Andrew Rush. "The only practical limitation you have is how much material you're providing to the system." The first Archinaut prototype is mostly just a proof-of-concept and won't be constructing mile-wide satellites anytime soon. "First you crawl, then you walk, then you run," says Rush. "We'll start out with manufacturing space-optimized trusses and booms and reflectors to provide a supply capability that we can't currently achieve." But once this tech gets off the ground, it can be used to build structures as big as their owners want them.
Tragedy of the commons out in space.
Wouldn't be too difficult by combining AI, robotics, and 3D printers. This would also be a good way to control how much radiation from the Sun reaches Earth's surface. Much safer, and more controllable, than trying to modify the oceans or weather.
The space rush is on. Who owns outer space?
With a big catcher and grinder, it could scoop up all the space junk around the planet, grind it up, process it, and then use it as an input to make shit.
So what if it accidentally grinds up Chinese and Russian spy satellites. It's all good.
I fail to see what's the gain between launching a rocket with 1 ton of preassembled componned or 1 ton of materia used by a space 3D printer to build those component. And unless there's 0% loss during the 3D printer process, I would even say it's less efficient that way.
The only way I can see a real gain is if most of the materia weight come directly from space. For instance, asteriod mining.
Elok
current build practice: *drop my 10mm socket and watch it roll down the driveway* oh...crap.
future space build practice: *drop my 10mm socket and watch it assume a decay orbit toward Scotland* oh....*booop*....crap....*boooop*
Good people go to bed earlier.
Giant McDonald's sign in space....
My guess would be that the raw materials would be lifted to space in a far more efficient way. When the payload is rock and sand you can send it with a bigger boom.
They asked when you can start working on Villa Straylight.
Bigly!
I would buy one, but I'm not sure it's worth the five users left on /. ...
...to build stuff on the Moon?
Will involve space, and helping each other.
Playing with Lego and all the rest of your toys, scattered all over the floor, and not having to clean anything up afterwards.
are my DAMN balls, for u to suck
"one of the only 3D printers in space." How many 3D printers are in space that the qualifier is necessary?
It makes total sense. It is always easier to build things in space. Just like living on Mars. It is so much easier than living on Earth. And now we have AI which makes it even easier.
When rockets can no longer hold oversize payloads, building in space might be the best way to go.
Naturally but kind of skipping an important step there. You also have to be able to supply materials in space including raw materials and the production equipment and the power source(s). Whether shipped from earth or mined from other planets/asteroids, you don't get to skip the step of having rockets deliver the machines and power source and the materials to be able to manufacture in space. It's going to be a lot more complicated than shipping even a very clever 3D printer. Actual assembly work is the "easy" bit.
Nearly everyone who has fanciful ideas about manufacturing and mining in space overlooks the supply chain problem. You cannot do useful manufacturing until you have a supply chain established which here on earth we tend to take for granted. Want to build a truss in space? Great. You at minimum need machine(s) that can make it, the tooling for that machine, material handling equipment to move everything around, a source of the right type of metal and other materials in a form factor usable for production, and a power supply. And those are just the broad categories each of which has a bill of materials a mile long of stuff that has to be made and delivered to the production site. 3D printers can mitigate some of the problems but far more remain. And it's going to be VERY expensive to build the supply chain and it's likely to take a very long time.
Don't get me wrong I'm all for manufacturing in space but it's going to be a LOT more complicated than shipping up a 3D printer and some powdered metal and/or plastic. I'm very glad to see people working seriously on the problem but it's going to be decades under the best of circumstances before we see space based manufacturing as more than a research project. There simply isn't enough funding currently to build meaningful off planet infrastructure for manufacturing any time soon.
Back in the 1980s, NASA and others were experimenting with "beam builders" to fabricate huge (hundreds of meters long) aluminum trusses for building structures in space. The idea was you loaded the beam builder with spools of aluminum "ribbon" which it then unrolled, folded, chopped and welded into triangular cross-section beam structures. A few prototypes were built, although I don't know if they were ever tested in space.
Here is one reference: https://www.ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19790059233&qs=t%3D0%26N%3D4294951547%2B4294965200%26No%3D10
Thats the coolest word Iâ(TM)ve heard in a long time.
I fail to see what's the gain between launching a rocket with 1 ton of preassembled componned or 1 ton of materia used by a space 3D printer to build those component.
The 3D printer doesn't require you to decide what to make with it prior to launch and it allows you to skip the delivery lead time for a product which could be substantial. Otherwise you are correct. You probably would need some sort of 3D printer like technology to manufacture a lot of stuff in space simply because a lot of the manufacturing techniques we use on earth simply wouldn't be viable due to supply chain issues and the need for compact and flexible production equipment.
The only way I can see a real gain is if most of the materia weight come directly from space. For instance, asteriod mining.
Asteroid mining is an idea that won't happen for a very long time. There are several huge obstacles to it including: 1) The fact that we don't have any mining or refining equipment that is space worthy nor any reasonable prospects of getting such equipment anytime soon. 2) The extravagant cost of getting the equipment (which again we don't have) to the asteroid and doing useful work with it. 3) Most useful products require multiple materials/components which cannot be sourced from a single asteroid even if it were financially viable to do so. For a long time to come it's going to be a lot cheaper to launch stuff from earth than to mine it from an asteroid.
Also the biggest obstacles actually are not material weight. We just haven't addressed the hard issues because it's SO expensive to get to orbit that they haven't been worth worrying about. But even if you drop cost to orbit to zero, the cost of building the technology and infrastructure to manufacture in space will likely dwarf even the current launch costs. Think of it this way. Ford builds cars and one of its assembly plants costs north of a billion dollars to create. That is just for final assembly. The cost of the production facilities and parts to build the product in its supply chain easily costs 100 times more than that (there are about 30,000 parts in a typical car). And we have proven and well developed sources of raw materials. All that to build a product we know how to make with proven technology we can manufacture with economies of scale. Making something the cost and complexity of cars in space at any sort of scale would cost a large fraction of the world GDP for the foreseeable future.
Space based manufacturing is arguably a worthwhile goal but we need to be realistic about how long it will take to make it economically viable.
The laws of thermodynamics prevent this from happening.
No, they do not: they just require that the system to do build such a sphere expends energy. The rate of expenditure will determine how rapidly you can build the structure. something this large would require a huge amount of energy to construct but, if you are willing to let the process take long enough the actual power required can be small.
However, beyond the impracticality of construction on a human timescale with current technology a planetary dyson sphere is an absoutely appalling idea for the Earth because, as a sphere, it will be gravitationally decoupled from the Earth inside it. This means that its position relative to the Earth inside it will be completely unstable and the sphere will have to have it's position continually corrected to prevent it impacting the Earth. The power and fuel requirements to do this make such a project completely useless even if we had the technology required to provide the power and thrust required.
There's considerable evidence to suggest that there's plenty of asteroids out there that are nearly pure iron - as in all we have to do is chop it up, hammer it out, or melt it down and cast/print with it.
Oh is that all?
Do you have even the vaguest idea how hard and expensive what you just proposed actually is? What equipment do you plan to use? Because literally none exists or is even in development to do that. We don't have more than even the vaguest idea how we could possibly do industrial scale mining in the vacuum of space. We don't have the technology and won't for some time to come.
Even if 10% of the material is some sort of vacuum-hardening epoxy bonding agent made on Earth, you can still get 90% of your material from space.
Got any more made up statistics you'd like to cite?
Biggest dimensionally or biggest by mass? They're already working on gravity wave "machines" which would extend over 100's or 1000's of miles, (of course, the problem is that we already have (on Earth) radio telescope arrays nearly the size of the planet.) I won't hold my breath. We'll have a couple hundred million people living in Antarctica before we have enough people living in space to economically justify such infrastructure. I'd say extinction of the species is more likely than having a billion people living in micro-gravity.
Big space stations and starships would have to be built in space due to the gravitational benefits. That also would tend to leave them unable to land without massive damage entering the atmosphere, unless they are able to separate into distinct sections, one of which could have the necessary size and shielding.
To me, the real question is whether or not our species will destroy itself, or get stuck in a cyberpunk-style corporate dystopia, before getting a chance to create a society like the Federation.
...than any mission to Mars. Anyone that truly understand space knows when you expend the delta-V to leave a gravity well, it so stupid to go down another one. And is to easier to make a proper habitat then build one on Mars.
One of the big arguments against the use of a rail-gun like space catapult is that cargo and humans would not survive the acceleration needed. Raw materials, on the other hand, could.
Just how far can you chuck a pumpkin?
But but the WORLD IS FLAT!
Since we're looking to move people OFF this planet of ignorance, perhaps it's best if we just ignore those mentalities, and left those people behind...
Like the triumphant return of the dinosaurs to their native home-world. (No, they didn't all die in the meteor collision.) But seriously, we're discussing things that may or may not happen, and if they happen it won't be in our lifetimes or the lifetimes of our children or grandchildren. On an internet forum. You know, where most of the intellectuals of the 21st century hang out.
Constructing a space elevator would make it significantly cheaper to reach space. There are a lot of technical problems that we have to solve first such as how to mass produce carbon nanotubes in space, but the benefits would be enormous.
On smaller scale projects in earth orbit, the raw materials could be rocketed and orbited to the manufacturing site as we do now. Sooner or later though, the cost of hoisting large megastructure masses to orbit could be prohibitive. If the raw materials were to come from space, then asteroid mining is a hypothetical idea, but it seems to me to have too many practical and economical limitations in this nascent concept stage. So, what about the moon? Here is a vision for the not too distant future.
Whatever the raw materials might be, lifting them out of lunar gravity to earth capture should be relatively cheap or on par with lifting to earth orbit. So, we set up lunar bases, meant to prospect for useful mineral deposits, then start mining. Like any new colony, buildings and infrastructure need a bootstrap process and period of time to ramp up to capacity. But, put a few essential pieces of machinery up there to start with, to extract and process some pioneer metals and materials, then use printers to build more machinery. Take advantage of no atmosphere and lots of sunlight to power the mining, milling, smelting, and manufacturing operations. Furthermore, use that same energy abundance to create or power electric propulsion systems or mass drivers to pop the processed materials off the surface enough to clear the Lagrange point. Earth gravity can then bring the materials to working orbit. A fleet of space tugs or ferries, operating perpetually up there, can help pilot the delivery pods to their precise orbit and location for actual manufacture. The entire affair can be made economically feasible by also mining the moon for profitable use back on Earth, such as precious metals, rare earths, and lithium.
Aside from having air to breath, the voyages of Columbus and the habitation of the Antarctic were not so far different. If the social and political will was there, it could be done.
Just an idea.
Given the vacuum insulation around everything, isn't cooling a much larger problem in space than on earth? Given the problems of heat dissipation on earth, wouldn't they be worse in space?
Second issue is speed. Speed of light is an issue for signal propagation across circuits in today's computer design -- if the idea is to create larger machines in space, won't that get worse?
But of course. Immensity can be bought very cheaply in space.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
If we stick to ships, the Prelude is six times larger than the Allure of the Seas in displacement at 600,000 tons and covers an area around 5 times that of the International Space Station at 450 tons.
This mismatch in weight vs size is the somewhat lame point the article's premise is based on.
I could change the equation dramatically by talking about the size of a blimp versus the ISS. The Hindenburg had a footprint larger than the ISS, weighed half as much, and enclosed more than 200 times the volume.
Also, certainly it is easy to argue that the ultimate size of machines in space is larger than is possible on Earth... or is it? What if we were to start completely covering Earth in shells of very strong engineered material, gradually transferring material from under the shells and building both downwards into the evacuated space and upwards as we do so, until we consume all of the Earth's material to the center of the Earth. We'd essentially be turning our planet into a vastly larger in volume, much lower density, satellite. We could throw in the moon's materials while we are at it. At that point, we suddenly see Earth as the very large machine in space it already is today.
Space mining and ore processing has major advantageous over earth bound processing.
It POTENTIALLY has advantages. It also has a lot of disadvantages. We know some of each and there undoubtedly are a lot of advantages and disadvantages we have yet to learn about. Most of the conjecture I read here on slashdot is the sort of uninformed musings you get from a science fiction story rather than evidence based engineering. What is 100% clear however is the economics of doing this which are hideously expensive and will remain so for a long time to come. There are technical obstacles that probably can be overcome but the biggest obstacles to doing space based mining will be economic ones and those are very well understood. Seriously, if we decide space based manufacturing is worthwhile (and it might be) it's going to be hugely expensive to bootstrap that industry because we have to build entire supply chains with technology we haven't yet developed in the most hostile environment imaginable for purposes we have barely begun to imagine.
Put that way though it sounds like a fun challenge. :-)
The first is the ore's aren't all oxygenated from earth's atmosphere, this means iron can be found in its raw form rather than the iron oxide that exists on earth.
Which is nice but it saves you some steps but adds others. Maybe you skip some (not all) of the refining but you have problems of material handling, heat dispersion, and more that are FAR easier to deal with on Earth if for no other reason than we have a lot of experience doing it and a lot of tools and methods to work with that we've had centuries to develop.
Another major advantage is that you can melt that ore with essentially a big magnifying glass and you have much longer to shape it because you don't' have air messing everything up.
That's not necessarily an advantage depending on what you are trying to do. A great deal of how materials perform is dependent on how their molecular bonds arrange. A lot of properties of materials we depend on actually come about precisely because of how they interact with oxygen and other molecules in our atmosphere. How we manage the heat and remove heat from materials matters a lot in what we get as a final product. Having longer to shape a material is not universally a positive trait though there are many cases where that would be helpful.
The hard part is getting metal-rich asteroids into earth orbit, not the actual mining or processing.
Two thoughts on that. 1) Getting asteroids into earth orbit is a TERRIBLE idea if it is anywhere close to Earth. If we have the ability to move asteroids around like that we also have the ability to drop them on to earth on a target of our choosing. They are de-facto weapons of mass destruction and we do not need more of those. 2) Your presumption that getting to the asteroids being the hard part is belied by the fact that we've already done that. We also already know how to build equipment to move them at least in principle. What we haven't done is develop ANY commercially viable equipment to transform an asteroid into useful products. We barely have a few research projects that are no where close to being able to turn raw iron into functional products. Your attempt to hand wave that as the easy part clearly indicates you don't work in manufacturing (I do) because if you did you'd immediately realize it is FAR harder than you are supposing.
We're probably further along on this than people realize, I expect private space companies will make this happen long before a government could probably entirely for space tourism to begin with.
No we most assuredly are not very far along with space based manufacturing. Our manufacturing prowess in space amounts to a few very small scale research projects. We are so far from commercially viable space mining or space manufacturing