Has anything been learnt from ISS about zero-G manufacturing that might make it a suitable platform for such by a private group?
Isn't the ISS supposed to be a staying waypoint for a mission to Mars?
Has anything been learnt from ISS about zero-G manufacturing that might make it a suitable platform for such by a private group?
Isn't the ISS supposed to be a staying waypoint for a mission to Mars?
Proctor and Gamble wants to better understand why colloids(shampoo, liquid detergents, medicine) separate, because that affects the shelf life of their products. If they can turn off gravity, they can figure out what other processes cause colloids to separate besides just gravity.
As far as manufacturing goes, there are not many products that are worth making in space right now. You need a product that is more valuable per unit mass than the cost per unit mass to launch something to LEO.
Now the interesting thing is that there have been commercial products manufactured in space. Latex microspheres were produced on the space shuttle and sold as calibration sources for microscopes.[1] Because microscope calibration needs literally microscopic amounts of these microsphere, per unit mass the product was very valuable.
[0] http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/comm... [1]http://www.panix.com/~kingdon/space/manuf.html [1]http://www.panix.com/~kingdon/space/manuf.html
SpacePharma is designing an end-to-end biological and chemical lab that can be launched on cubesats to perform experiments in zero g at the fraction of the cost and they aren't the only ones.
http://www.geektime.com/2016/01/06/beyond-spacex-10-space-co...