Also, there are large headwinds from having to ship up a large quantity of raw material and have to deorbit a payload so fragile that any amount of shock is unacceptable. Maybe a high purity silicon boule pays for these headwinds with room for profit on top. I'm skeptical, but time will tell.
*crisps
It's from the UK.
A couple of meters long steel rod with a dissipator on the end can easily keep electronics at Earth surface temperatures even if you heat the other end to 1000°C.
But how do you get the power to the heater in a compact way?
High vacuums aren't at all impossible on Earth and silicon boules are already single crystals.
What exactly about their process permits such a huge quality improvement?
https://scfh.ru/en/papers/vacuum-in-the-wake/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_Shield_Facility
I'm not saying it's practical, but it's pretty cool.
What hasn't been solved yet and Space Forge (and Varda et al for biotech) are hoping to solve are the unit economics of reentry vehicles to actually make it viable for manufacturing.
Its launchers are still the best when it comes to reliability I believe, though not competitive on cost anymore since the advent of spaceX (Ariane6's first flight was in 2024 and its price per kilogram is just an order of magnitude worse than spaceX). Definitely missed a step.
Still, France has an active and ongoing space program since about 1970.
Is the idea that it will manufacture all of these chips and then both the 'factory' and the resulting materials will return from space, or that the factory would stay in orbit and send materials back?
LOL! Talk about an anticlimax. Either this is a lack of imagination on the CEO's part, or he's dumbing it down for us, or that level of silicon purity/regularity, is one of those nice-sounding but impractical Platonic ideals that ends up being kind of a waste. But it, and/or solving the attendant problems, might be an important precursor for some future innovation.
Silicon boules are grown with defined orientations. There's a system of flat edges ground into the wafers which indicate the orientation.
> "This sort of semiconductor would go on to be in the 5G tower in which you get your mobile phone signal, it's going to be in the car charger you plug an EV into, it's going to be in the latest planes."
Okay, but, we have 5G towers, car chargers, and planes right now?
I understand that purer material is better, but to what extent are the impurities of current wafer production methods limiting us? Why is shooting the furnace into space the best option? Why is making wafers 4+ orders of magnitude more expensive the solution we should go for?
Think with it a little - the statement “in the 5G tower” is intended to bring the context of this event closer to those who are not knowledgeable about this technology, but would nevertheless read the article. You and I may understand that the economies of scale don’t make sense yet - but they could, some day, if this technology succeeds, be relevant to the local neighborhood.
To many, the 5G tower is the most mystical, mysterious technology in their neighborhood - and indeed, the silicon ingots being manufactured this way would, eventually, find their way to the local neighborhood if this technology is successful.
It would probably have been more appropriate to say “some day these ingots will power the supercomputers in your pocket”, which would be an accurate statement - but that is a whole order of magnitude of different economic scale than in the industrialization of cell networks. Maybe it’d be more appropriate for the BBC writer to have said that satellites might one day benefit from space-grown silicon wafers - but that is still to distant to the Mom and Pop readership they’re targeting in these articles…
But we might discover other uses, that's what science is.
You would have to 1) keep turning it toward the sun and b) reduce time in earth's shadow, which means a polar orbit?
Why bring back the entire spacecraft and not just the finished product?
I'm also curious how they handle cooling the silicon, since dissipating heat in space is kind of difficult.
Plus, they can study the oven after the process which is likely to be helpful if the entire experiment poops the bed.
One of the things I truly believe will elevate our species is space industrialization. If, in 20 years or so, we send a fleet of space furnaces to 16 Psyche [1], there is a very real possibility that we will be able to move a lot of Earths heavy industrial processes to space. Can you imagine - 3D printed Starship hulls being made from the immense resources of 16 Psyche?
Literal pallets of iPhones being landed from near earth orbit.
It sounds like whacky science fiction now, and for now it really is just that, but the launch and successful mission of Space Forge and other companies like it bring us all a single step closer to seeing that reality play out.
I truly hope we can survive long enough to move heavy metal industry to space, and use that event to return the Earth to a garden state. It’s a long shot, but oh what a beautiful world it would be in 100 years time if this dream can be kept alive, and actually achieved.
That's not to say it will happen again. But it's not a certain thing.
>> Radiators facing cold space can freely produce temperatures near absolute zero for ultra-fast curing without the need for cryogenics.
I dont see a path to a product. I see a company farming investment and government programs with overhyped "experiments" that have been already done many times. They even talk about testing a heat shield for reentry as if that tech is somehow new. Want to bring samples back? Send your microwave to the space station and bring them back like everyone else.
