Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hajola 944 days ago
There are manufacturing processes that benefit from microgravity (e.g. growing protein crystals for the pharma industry, producing semiconductors, etc).

Beyond that it would be a significant boon for science.

1 comments

Semiconductors and microgravity, can you elaborate on what part of the production process would be improved?
There's a paper on the subject here: https://osf.io/d6ar4/

Seems like the primary benefit comes to silicon wafer manufacturing. Growing pure silicon crystal is much easier to do in a microgravity, vacuum environment:

> The study reported that for semiconductor crystals processed in LEO compared to terrestrial samples, more than 80 percent improved in either one or a combination of structure, uniformity, reduction of defects, and/or electrical and optical properties–and some by orders of magnitude

For actual device manufacturing, there are potential benefits as well, but this is less well researched area (possibly as a result of the difficulty of getting advanced IC manufacturing equipment into earth orbit).

I do somewhat doubt that the economics would work out. Silicon wafers are expensive, but I'm not sure if the price is currently higher than that of launching a bunch of sand to low earth orbit.
You wouldn't launch sands to LEO, but the equipment used for bootstrapping a mining operation on the moon or asteroid.
I think the point is you'd be able to build products in space that you cannot build on Earth for any cost currently.
You can 3D print organs in space that you can't in Earth, there was just a successful trial of printing a knee meniscus.

https://www.issnationallab.org/redwire-space-3d-prints-menis...

What fraction of machine time is currently spent pumping wafers down to molecular-beam vacuum? What fraction of machine mass is dedicated to holding that vacuum? Vibration isolation would also be much easier. Not sure if these are enough to matter, let alone enough to justify a rocket, but maybe the math can be made to work.