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Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

Yes it would, but launching stuff into orbit is expensive and making ultrasensitive instruments launch-proof is trickier (and more expensive) than you'd think.

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Once we have a proper suite of in-orbit manufacturing (not just 3d printing a plastic part) it's going to be a straight up Cambrian explosion event for what technology we can design for a space environment by letting go of vibration tolerances, G force tolerances and rocket dimension constraints. The new ways to manufacture are cool, but the dropping of existing constraints is a dream for a potential new wave of creativity for both new problems to fix in a new environment, with orders of magnitude operational scale (Everything is still basically bespoke one offs, bar a number of companies I can count on my fingers) and how to create solutions for all that new scale entails.

On a tangent here, but "not just 3d printing a plastic part" got me thinking.

Scientists, instead of requesting time on Hubble, ask time for the 3DBuilderAndExperimenter, give it a blueprint and inputs/outputs, it runs, returns any results, and is recycled.

The first scientist should ask the genie for more wishes, er, I mean, for the 3DbuilderAndExperimenter to build another 3DBuilderAndExperimenter

Certainly, professor Von Neumann: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine

We are such machines, so we know they’re possible to make, even though we don’t yet know how to make one on Earth let alone in space.

But we only need to make one of them!

The “and is recycled” part puts a crimp in that plan. :-)

There a bunch of things that could be perhaps easier manufactured in space. For example, being in orbit provides a few conditions ideal for semiconductor fabrication - no terrestrial vibrations, high vacuum, microgravity and high cleanliness. Of course we still need to develop process that uses a minimal amount of water and power to make it viable in orbit.

I wonder if people on the ISS could make this device from components. Then you don't need to launch it.

The ISS is actually a pretty bad microgravity environment. Human occupants and their life-support systems lead to rather strong system vibrations. Also the low orbit required for efficient supply flights causes a significant amount of atmospheric drag. Space stations are mainly there for show, the actual science is better done somewhere else.

Surely how good it is for an experiment depends on the experiment? Microgravity effects on biology don’t need anything close to the same precision as the test in the link.

I meant:

- send components to ISS

- assemble

- subtly nudge the container to a different orbit

- wait for it to do the experiment and catch when the orbits meet again. Or if that's too hard just wait for results to be transmitted

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