Post by Nick Austin

Could space be the place for the next industrial revolution? How manufacturing in space is now a serious long-term proposition and considers how architects might design off-world factories….

Whilst you’re reading these words, there’s a bright red sports car circling our solar system, a crash test dummy strapped to its driving seat, echoes of Bowie’s Space Oddity reverberating around the chamber of its helmet from a long-kaput radio. The car, Elon Musk’s personal Tesla Roadster, was launched from the nose cone of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in February 2018 and watched live on YouTube by 2.3 million people – a PR stunt fitting for the 21st century. Yet that little red sports car zooming through the galaxy is also an apt symbol for the new race for space; a race with very real off-world opportunities that extend way beyond mere ‘space tourism’. It seems the sky is no longer the limit for business opportunity.

Since the beginning of the space race in the 1950s, the biggest barrier to building a business off-world has been the cost. Single-use hardware left to crash and burn post take-off has meant that lifting just a few tonnes of material into space can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

The successful launch of Musk’s Falcon Heavy rocket marks a significant turning point. It is designed to deliver a maximum payload to low-Earth orbit of 64 tonnes – the equivalent of putting five London double-decker buses in space, according to the BBC. Such performance is slightly more than double that of the world’s next most powerful rocket, the Delta IV Heavy, but at one third of the cost, most likely down to the recovery and reuse of the rocket’s boosters.

Musk, along with other business visionaries, sees a time when we will live and work in space, with human colonies established on the Moon, Mars or in galaxies far, far away. The launch of Falcon Heavy and NASA’s recent announcement to commence building the Lunar Orbital Platform Gateway in 2022 are just some of the first giant steps mankind is already taking in its quest for space colonisation. Therefore, as forward-thinking architects, we too need to consider the real practicalities of designing buildings for outer space and start working towards possible solutions. Of course, we wouldn’t be the first to do so – in 2013 Foster + Partners, in conjunction with the European Space Agency (ESA), undertook a study to explore the possibilities of using 3D printing to construct lunar habitations on the moon’s southern pole. But what interests Stephen George + Partners, as a practice with a strong specialism in industrial design, is that if humans are going to live on colonies in space we’ll need factories and manufacturing facilities to support us and keep us alive.

Beyond self-sufficiency, manufacturing in space has long been proposed as a key space industry to take advantage of the microgravity and vacuum conditions – indeed, tentative steps have already been made in this direction, with companies such as FOMS and Made In Space using the International Space Station to demonstrate the zero-gravity manufacturing of high-quality optical fibres and 3D-printing tools for use in space.

We would argue that there are increasingly compelling arguments for off-world manufacturing – particularly in relation to the earth’s dwindling resources and the negative impact of heavy industry on our environment.

Addressing a conference in California last year, Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO and founder of private space travel company Blue Origin, declared that there should be no heavy industry on Earth in the future, adding that it should be reserved for living and light industry only. “We need to protect {the Earth), and the way we will is by going out into space,” said Bezos. “In at least a few hundred years… all of our heavy industry will be moved off-planet.”

It has long been thought that the moon and asteroids could contain valuable raw materials, such as minerals and ores suitable for manufacturing processes. In fact, the ten rarest elements currently used by humans are extracted from deposits on Earth that are associated with ancient cratering events caused by asteroids. It therefore makes sense to consider extracting these elements at their source in space.

Investors, too, see the idea of an extraction industry on asteroids or the moon as a serious long-term proposition rather than a sci-fi fantasy. In May last year Goldman Sachs declared its own enthusiasm for space and the building of an “asteroid-grabbing spacecraft”. In 2015, more than 50 venture capital firms invested in space helping reduce launch costs and spur innovation across related industries, according to Goldman Sachs analyst Noah Poponak. The price of spacecraft is plummeting, thanks to reusable rockets from Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin. It used to cost $35 million (£28 million) to send one person up on a Soyuz rocket, whereas today Virgin Galactic aims to get tourists into space for $250,000 (£200,000), says Goldman Sachs.

Whilst the economics of going into space are now more feasible, it is the potential rewards that are proving attractive to investors. Many asteroids are rich in the mineral platinum, which is becoming increasingly scarce on Earth and extremely valuable – approximately $1million (£686,982) per one thousand cubic centimetres. According to a 2012 Reuters interview with Planetary Resources, a single asteroid the size of a football field could contain $25bn to $50bn worth of platinum.

Government agencies, too, have their eye on these mineral-rich resources. NASA last year announced plans to launch a 2022 mission to find the asteroid belt 16 Psyche which contains 130 miles of valuable resources such as iron, nickel, gold, platinum and copper. If that could be transported to Earth, the iron in it would be worth an estimated $8,000 quadrillion. To put that into perspective, the CIA World Factbook estimates that all the money in the world amounts to approx $80 trillion – no wonder experts have cautioned that the asteroid’s value could tank commodity prices and lead to the total collapse of the world’s economy… a thought perhaps best parked to one side for the moment!

Perhaps the most significant sign that asteroid mining is now becoming a real possibility was a law passed in Luxembourg in August last year that provides a legal framework for the extraction of resources on asteroids and the moon. Of course, if you want that legal protection for your asteroid mine you’ll need to set up an office in Luxembourg, but the Grand Duchy plans to invest at least $200 million in related R&D projects, and has offered to purchase equity stakes in companies that move there. Two leading US asteroid mining companies, Planetary Resources (backed by Titanic and Avatar director James Cameron) and Deep Space Industries have already taken up the offer, the latter agreeing to co-fund its first spacecraft with the government.

Clearly, there is a long and compelling list of reasons to go to the moon or an asteroid, live, work and manufacture there. But what could those facilities possibly look like and how would we build them?

For instance, how would we connect a structure to the surface – or indeed, would we even need to? Whilst factories in space may eventually exist solely to build further factories or sustainable support systems for off-world human colonies, it is not beyond reason that some retrieved materials or manufactured products will need to return to Earth. Does this mean the structure comes back or is it sacrificed for the payload? In other words, do we need a significant foundation attachment or temporary fixing for future separation?

Industrial buildings here on Earth already provide great opportunities for façade renewables – in space there would be even greater opportunity for operational façades, exploiting the potential of 24/7 solar energy. This would not only involve extensive photovoltaic panelling, but possibly steerable arrays of mirrors to concentrate solar energy in the manufacturing areas for thermal processing.

When it comes to human occupation of space, popular science fiction has perhaps over-influenced public thinking – whether the moonbase of Space 1999 (1975) or the mining station of Con-Am 27 in the Sean Connery starring Outpost (1980). The reality will, however, most likely be very different.

Here on Earth, manufacturing or logistics facilities designed by Stephen George + Partners largely comprise a building of three parts: industrial process, storage and office space. Off-world we think that there is every likelihood that this will change to industrial process, storage and accommodation. Whilst quite feasibly necessary due to speed of light constraints on communication, the extent of human accommodation would however be minimal as the majority of manufacturing processes can be carried out by completely autonomous robotics. The majority of off-world industrial activity would still need to take place in enclosed facilities to keep out the abrasive dust and prevent pollution of the surface, but oxygenation of the entire building would probably be implausible and also unnecessary if processes are fully automated. Recent tests aboard the International Space Station on Archinaut, a robotic system developed by Made In Space for NASA, has already demonstrated a wide range of in-space manufacturing and assembly capabilities. Steve Jurczyk, the head of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, believes that “in-space robotic manufacturing and assembly is going to revolutionise the way we design, deploy and operate systems in space.”

Indeed, it is now advances in robotics where the edges of science fiction and science fact are beginning to blur. Smarter, faster and cheaper, with capabilities such as sensing, memory and trainability, industrial robots are revolutionising the manufacturing sector and we will explore this ‘rise of the machines’ further in our next ‘Futures’ discussion paper.

In the meantime, keep watching the skies. There’s a little red roadster trailblazing a route to our manufacturing future: http://www.whereisroadster.com/index.html