Microgravity Will Change How We Make Everything

building new things has led to some of humanity's biggest leaps forward we made tools forge new materials and learn to produce them for millions and then billions with every new innovation comes new industries new economies new challenges and we're always looking for what comes next the industrialization of space I think will be one of the great economic booms of this century space offers a whole new environment to create things things we can't make on earth gravity in general is something that we all just take for granted because it's just always here it affects everything what becomes interesting is what happens when you take that away private companies are creating new materials 3d printing tools even living tissue and developing the technology to build entire factories in space if successful full profit manufacturing could lead to a new gold rush launching the business of space to its next giant leap Ellen Moscone and Richard Branson Jeff Bezos and many other industrialists they're making big investments to go up there but there has to be a why there has to be a reason to go to space we want to see a very robust commercial marketplace in space but the other thing that we have to do is we have to prove we have to prove the industries that ultimately are going to be able to take advantage of the microgravity environment of space in space we're opening the way to private enterprise since the 1980s companies have been investigating the unique properties of microgravity yielding major breakthroughs in the areas of biomedicine and advanced materials research and now some are looking to start production manufacturing in space has at its core the following idea this extraordinary environment with completely different set of environmental factors than the earth can enable you to manufacture things that you couldn't manufacture on earth that have value our economy has historically been a you know a value-added economy right we take raw material and we turn it into steel and we sell that steel for profit finding new ways of making things is historically the makings of economic boom 3q1 here in July of 2019 SpaceX's CRS 18 launched with over a dozen new research projects including investigations being conducted by Goodyear and adidas both companies hope that studying their products in microgravity could unlock new opportunities also aboard the mission is a biomaterial 3d printer and with it the chance to print whole human organs Spock be at that one side for go ahead so you were working with DMT to go ahead and get our command when go up a little early correct yes then with is available okay so I'm just pressing where the numbers are and making sure they're [Music] Christina we should be good to go hands-free now copy it the thumbs up we do want to start by opening up the cassette kit it's just past 3:00 a.m. and the team at Tech Shot is prepping their initial printing run for the newly-arrived bio fabrication facility or BFF fueled by coffee and the type of food you might expect to find at 3:00 a.m. the team is working directly with astronauts aboard the ISS all from the comforts of tech shop headquarters located just outside Louisville Kentucky now we want to double check the smart pumps or in the up position we're gonna be sliding the Compendium just don't want to bump them with the cassette I think that looks great we are good to go ahead and put the door back on we'll be able to do some printing from the outside the BFF doesn't look that much different to traditional 3d printers but inside these smart pumps are being loaded with living cells and for the company all eyes are focused on the inaugural drop paving the first biological brick on the long road to printing human organs currently there's over a hundred and thirteen thousand people on the organ donation list and 22 people are dying every day because there's not an organ available bfff has that long-term potential to someday maybe be able to provide some hope and a cure for some of those people this is John valincia the CEO of tech shot a company he co-founded over 30 years ago while his latest project just succeeded in its initial test prints the BFF has a long way to go before it's printing anything as complex as a human liver or heart tech shot is demonstrated in the BFF technology with this current flight and we anticipate being able to print organs and structures might be five to ten years out bio printers have been on earth for over a decade and can print things like ear and nose cartilage that a living tissue but for complex systems like organs the difficulty has been printing the vascular networks within the tissue itself without vascular tissue to distribute the needed nutrients any printed cells would die off well before they could be used and tech shop believes that gravity is a big part of the challenge so let's just say that you want to create something that has one layer of cells and then on top of that a different layer of cells and then on top of that like a third layer cells so one way that you could do that would be to just print one cell and a layer and then your second layer with another type of cell and then your third layer with another type of cell but depending on those materials over a short period of time those cells may not stay in those layers they may settle out and then end up combining you know you think of you know printing if you try to print with water here on earth you know what would happen it would just squirt out like out of a water gun and that is because in a gravity environment you know everything wants to just squirt out and wet out and spread out but in the microgravity environment you don't have to worry about any of that so you have a much wider range of materials that you can print with to combat the effects of gravity on earth we searchers have used scaffolded structures in order to support the growing sales the problem is a lot of ways that that is accomplished isn't necessarily the best for biology it can limit the types of materials that you can use and it can also limit the types of cells that can really thrive in that environment in microgravity you wouldn't necessarily have to do that you could have your different layers or areas or sections of different types of cells and put them next to each other and there are no other forces they're gonna cause them to mix so you have this opportunity to be able to make these small regions in three dimensions in a different type of way and different type of structure that would be very difficult to do on the ground microgravity enabled bio printing still has numerous hurdles to cross before it can produce a product for sale only now that the printer is operating aboard the ISS can researchers begin to understand the correct materials and process necessary not only to print organs but to culture and preserve them long enough to return back to earth but all that time and research is part of tech shorts plan tech shots business model is to be a tech engine we're generating new technologies and then if we feel like that technology has a potential commercial potential we spin that off into a different company or to a different group they liken their business to levi-strauss in the 1800's during the gold rush levi-strauss started out by providing canvas material for tents and wagons and when those miners needed a more durable fabric the now iconic blue jeans were born the business model of selling pickaxes as opposed to going out and panning for gold really certainly applies to space and there are many companies at the component level that are providing products and services to launch companies to satellite operators to NASA one of the challenges in that business model is you need a gold rush it's not clear that 3d printed organs could set off any kind of a gold rush to space so in order to stay in business tax shot needs to have other projects making sure it doesn't keep all of its eggs in one satellite this is my science fair project then I started in eighth grade the whole experiment was to see how the chicken embryo develop in space without the presence of gravity this science project evolved into the space shuttle project imagine this chicken egg in the back of the barnyard gravity's causing the yolk to fall to the bottom of the egg that a hen has a natural instinct of turning of that egg around so therefore the yolk will fall go back up to the top and gravity pulls it back down to the bottom camp now what would happen to that egg up in space the project was sponsored by Kentucky Fried Chicken in which their worldwide headquarters is located in Louisville and so the the engineer that I worked with Mark deucer he and I are the ones that decided to start tech shot and start it right here in Louisville Kentucky we started in a motel it was just two two rooms and eventually we went into four rooms of the motel and then as TechShop matured and developed and gained more projects and more opportunities than we decided you know we're in this for the long haul and so we built a world-class research facility here that we're sitting in today and here just across the street from that first motel room Tech Shot is currently working on 15 active projects creating technology for NASA the military and major pharmaceutical companies all with the goal to support researchers in microgravity last year was tech shots best year in his history I think that's reflective of the excitement of the new opportunities they're out there for space and if they're lucky one of these projects could yield that catalyst of a space Gold Rush but they aren't alone in this race another company located in Silicon Valley view's making things in space escorted their mission even down to their name this is fiber-optic cable it works because the fiber reflects light over and over inside the structure and even if you bend it the light still comes through the other end but in this application is nothing more than a modern looking lava lamp the best fiber-optic cable is being used to transmit data all over the world in fact undersea cables carry 99% of all the data that crosses oceans optical fiber usually made from silica is important because it can transmit data incredibly quickly over a long distance before needing to have its signal amplified but research done by the US Air Force in the 1990s proved that it would be possible to produce a fiber known as Zee bland that could far exceed traditional silica fiber the only catch it needs to be made in microgravity is e bland is an optical glass that has a transmission window that's about five times wider than traditional silicon glass and it has and has a signal loss that's 10 to 100 times better than traditional silica glass this is andrew rush the CEO of made in space a company with a mission to create a new industrial foothold in space and it sees the burn as potentially the first material that can be made in space and sold on earth so this is a preform of Z plan it starts out as this nice dog-bone cylinder and then it gets inserted into a furnace this gets thinner and thinner thinner than the width of your own hair and then you start pulling that and so if everything works out you get a spool like this from our earlier test runs basically looks like fishing line while it is possible to produce see burn on earth it's nowhere near the potential of what you can produce in microgravity earthy fractures even suffers from too many crystals in the end the material and basically what happens is when light or power goes through these don't crystal domains they reduce each time trading a power loss throughout the the length of fiber going through microgravity suppresses these formations and doing so creates more of a mono crystalline structure so you know of all these domain drops and you have less of a power drop over that length of fiber you know you can go transatlantic and trans-pacific without having repeaters in the lines like traditional fiber lines do today you can imagine providing five 10 50 times more bandwidth down the same line of fiber by using Z bland instead of silica that you begin to you begin to scratch the surface of the of the economic potential of Z point they estimate that a kilogram of Z burn could sell for tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and that high price per kilogram is important when it comes to space manufacturing historically the barrier to doing a lot of commercial activity in space has been that it cost so much money to get to space do things and then come back you know it can literally cost like tens of thousands of dollars a kilogram to launch operate and return and that's why things like Zee bland are so attractive because we can sustainably sell them for tens of thousands of dollars a kilogram meaning at some point whole factories could be created in space receiving raw material from the ground and shipping microgravity enabled C bland back to earth but the problem is it's all still theoretical made in space has been working on C burn for over four years and has flown for missions to test their manufacturing techniques with more planned in the future but they still expect to be a few years away from producing a product that could be sold on earth let alone scaling that to larger industries it's very interesting and a little counterintuitive the most successful companies in space are the companies that consistently say how can I do this on earth there's been many products that started with the vision of actually manufacturing in space and ended up with a discovery phase in space and manufacturing on earth and that's good news for consumers that's good news for the end users of those products because that reduces costs you don't build your manufacturing plant on the most expensive real estate you can possibly get ahold of you build your manufacturing plant where you can manufacture economically for made in space though discovering the first product that can truly be made in space is more than just profit and loss the establishment of space manufacturers even as a product line is is core to our vision right that's that's the industrialization of space right there that's the Netscape moment of low Earth orbit commercialization if in our research and development for Z bland say we've found ways of improving Z bland that we could actually apply to us really like apply in a gravity field we would be excited about that you know for us we take the profits from that pile that back in and do it more cool space stuff and while a company is also investigating other materials like Z blonde that can be produced in space they've already laid the groundwork for a whole new way of thinking about in space manufacturing and they call it our Connaught so our Kanaan is is one of many steps towards those broader visions are cannot is a more of a capability than a thing the capability can enable virtually anything you think of in terms of structures in space you can build large things small things that are optimized it doesn't really matter are Connaught blends robotic manufacturing with 3d printing allowing it to create and assemble products in space meaning instead of flying something like say a satellite to space you could create them there but before made in space can use our Connaught as an in space factory it needs to turn its vision into a sustainable business there is no shortage in space of visionaries [Music] cheers to make Mars impossible the visionaries that we are seeing succeed are the visionaries that that attach their vision to an incremental pathway [Music] we've been very fortunate to work closely with NASA for a number of years in developing gravity independent manufacturing technologies and the first one of those technologies that we really tackled was 3d printing national space station has it sound 3d printer and look at this astronauts created the first object to be made with it it's a white printer part the first print that we did was a little a plate for the printer it's an essence of maintance based on I mean with the first we actually kind of joked that the first thing we did was demonstrate that you could make like self repairing robots in space to date made in space has created over two hundred objects aboard the ISS and with its second printer named the additive manufacturing facility they were able to not only prove their technology but turn it into a business we start kind of an interesting deal with them where we actually retained ownership of the device and and actually operated as a service and you know printed parts for NASA for other individuals for companies for schools so really starting to build on with this machine shop in space kind of business model the approach that we've taken it made in space has been to have these really great this really inspiring big vision do we take those big that big vision and we decompose that into digestible chunks like steps alike along that path toward these fantastic futures and that first incremental step for arc naught is to change how we think about manufacturing satellites Argonaut one project is a free flying satellite which will manufacture 10-meter booms and those 10-meter booms will have solar arrays on them which allow a small set to manufacture on the order of about a kilowatt of power the Ark naught one mission were launched in 2022 it's part of a public-private partnership with NASA and the project aims to reduce the cost of putting satellites into orbit while satellites have been getting smaller if you need a satellite that'll require lots of power you'll most likely need a massive solar array but large arrays are difficult to fit into rocket payloads the so-called tyranny of the fairing and it gets expensive one way around this problem will suspend heavily on engineers to devise solutions for folding arrays into compact configurations then deploy at their full size once in space but all that work and extra weight on a rocket can add tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to a launch cost our Connaught gives satellite makers a new option include a 3d printer and robotic arm onto their existing satellites and let arc nought build their very large solar arrays in space this could reduce the cost of getting power-hungry satellites into orbit and potentially open up whole new industries to space probably the most significant factor for the financial success of a space-based or space related business is economies of scale the more activity there is the more feasible it is both made in space and NASA hopes that our Connaught will help reduce the cost of doing business in space but it's still unclear whether larger and cheaper solar arrays is the answer to finding scale in production a successful strategy for manufacturing in space is to demonstrate capabilities and to have adaptable capabilities that can serve different customers when you combine that robotic assembly and additive manufacturing it really opens the door for customization for clients folks may say hey I actually don't need that much power because of my mission I need but I need a big antenna or I need a large radiator because its general means that I can provide those services quickly and at low cost so we hope that folks see what we're doing and are inspired by it and say hey this is what I need so yeah it'd be great if somebody came to us and said this is the thing that we want to make if we're like oh my gosh that's that's the killer app the hope for arc naught just like with zebra and organ printing is that one of these businesses can be that spark for space industrialization I think once people see the potential of microgravity I think a lot more people a lot more commercial entities will get involved in space research because I think it is such a unique environment that that different way of thinking leads to innovation and so I think you see so much excitement so much interest because the potential to come up with new products new innovations is real the ability to manufacture in space means that we kind of break the tyranny of the the launch fairing right and we can now make structures that are really enormous like big structures that are on the size and scale of things that we're we're comfortable with and we interact with on earth you know on a consistent basis you know like larger buildings multi-story buildings nothing like that exists in space but we need to be able to make structures and spacecraft and habitats that are that size if we are really to - you know sustain sustainably move into space move into low-earth orbit and beyond and his industry enters low-earth orbit will begin to explore the next financial future the moon Mars even asteroids contain potentially invaluable resources on the next giant leap we'll explore the private companies developing the technology needed for offworld mining but in order for it to become a business it'll take another giant leap [Music] you

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

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Keywords: News, bloomberg, Giant Leap, Space, Commercial spaceflight, Rockets, Mars, Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Space hotels, NASA, Moon missions, Low earth orbit, Commercialization of Space, Documentary

Id: fUj1-cPaFgo

Length: 24min 6sec (1446 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2019