Seems like a science fiction, right. Think of a factory, located hundreds of kilometers above the Earth, churning out high-quality materials. Do you feel it as impossible?
But a Cardiff-based company is a step closer to making this a reality.
British aerospace manufacturing company Space Forge has sent a microwave-sized factory into the Earth’s orbit, and have demonstrated that its furnace can be switched on and reach temperatures of around 1,000 degrees Centigrade.
They plan to manufacture material for semiconductors, which can be used back on Earth in electronics in communications infrastructure, computing and transport.
Conditions in space are ideal for making semiconductors, which have the atoms they’re made of arranged in a highly ordered 3D structure.
When they are being manufactured in a weightless environment, those atoms line up absolutely perfectly. The vacuum of space also means that contaminants can’t sneak in.
The purer and more ordered a semiconductor is, the better it works.
“The work that we’re doing now is allowing us to create semiconductors up to 4,000 times purer in space than we can currently make here today,” says Josh Western, CEO of Space Forge.
“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.”
