Depending on who you ask, space-based technology is past peak hype, at the beginning of its investment growth curve, or in an infrastructure-building phase akin to the railway industry in 1800s America. One emerging technology could change everything for startups and aerospace giants, however — in-space manufacturing.
One of the hard limits of building businesses in space is launching things to space. It’s a difficult problem to overcome, and the cost realities of making it happen are bound to some extent by physics, even with efficiencies made possible by new approaches from companies like SpaceX, Rocket Lab and Blue Origin.
Launching objects from Earth to space doesn’t just carry a financial burden; escaping our gravity and atmosphere is not a gentle process, and there are limits to the fragility, shape and materials that can be used in payloads delivered to orbit on a rocket, even when covered by a protective fairing.
Innovative designs like the spring-style expanding antenna developed by NSLComm for geocommunications satellites can provide workarounds for some of these limitations, but not all. But in-space manufacturing technology currently in development may have the potential to obviate both hard design and launch cost limits.
A number of companies are already developing the capability to build spacecraft, research equipment and advanced hardware in space using components and base materials transferred from Earth (much easier than transporting complex devices) and, potentially, mined locally from asteroids, planetary bodies or even decommissioned and non-functional older satellites.
“We think that in-space manufacturing, specifically, married with lower-cost access to space, along with modern electronics and computing, is the killer foundation that enables us to really break some of the constraints that we put on everything we’ve ever sent to space,” is how Made In Space CEO and President Andrew Rush put it, speaking on stage last week at annual space industry symposium the International Astronautical Congress.
Made In Space, a Mountain View-based company founded in 2010, develops and deploys in-space manufacturing technologies. In 2013, it sent the first-even 3D printer to space to demonstrate the viability of its technology, leveraging that early success into a deal with legacy space giant Northrop Grumman to develop the Archinaut, an in-space, high-precision robotic manufacturing platform which can take on tasks like building complex and highly sensitive telescopes or modify and enhance spacecraft already in orbit.
Once online, this technology will dramatically raise the ceiling of what’s possible – while also changing the cost curve.
“The very first satellite we build in orbit will have the capability to produce five to 10 times more power than the state-of-the-art small satellites that exist today,” Rush said. “And that amount of power really eliminates a design constraint for these for these satellites. They no longer have to count every watt – we can put power hog sensors on these small sats that we previously could only fly on larger-size [spacecraft], which lowers the cost of delivering capability to space.”
Meanwhile, longtime satellite and space robotics industry veteran Maxar is also working towards developing in-space manufacturing capabilities and solutions. The company’s ‘Restore-L’ program, which will launch a robotics spacecraft to orbit with the mission of approaching, grappling and refueling a satellite in orbit, is one step in a path that leads to making entirely new things and upgrading capabilities with all-new modifications for older spacecraft.
“We are actually working in that direction, and Restore-L will have a large role to play in that demonstration of orbit assembly and manufacturing,” said Al Tadros, VP of Space Solutions at Maxar in an interview.
Restore-L is set to take flight in 2022; in partnership with NASA, it’s scheduled to service the Landsat 7, a government-owned satellite originally launched in 1999. Landsat 7 was never designed for refuelling or any kind of in-space servicing post-launch, which is part of what makes Restore-L a landmark demonstration mission — if successful, it’ll demonstrate the potential for leveraging and extending the useful life of existing space assets, along with the viability of servicing new satellites, an aim of startup Orbit Fab.
Like Made in Space, Maxar will also be looking to move past the limits of what’s possible with launch technology today by focusing on assembly and construction in space.
“Our core business has been for the last 25 years, building communication satellites for the global commercial communications industry,” Tadros said. “We have over 90 communication satellites in orbit. A lot of them are volume-constrained by a launch vehicle fairing. So we literally have to package in an origami style our satellites, and then deploy them or unfurl them in orbit. And what we’re going to demonstrate with Restore-L, in addition to the servicing, is the ability to assemble on orbit purpose-built and fabricated segmented elements for antennas or structures or payloads […] to avoid the limits of the fairing.”
That’s going to have big benefits for large, multinational telecommunications clients and others with deep pockets and well-established businesses, but startups can benefit, too. Once robotic manufacturing, assembly and fabrication assets are actually working in space, cost curves will start to trend downwards on their use – and even before larger-scale projects benefit from that effect, these platforms are being designed to be able to fill any idle time with smaller tasks. Those could include attaching small, inexpensive sensors, cameras and other startup-built hardware to existing spacecraft whose costs are mostly eaten up by the larger legacy players that put them in space to begin with. With orbital refueling and in-situ modifications, startups paying to hitch a ride becomes a pure profit business for those primary spacecraft owners long after their original missions have delivered their planned revenue.
“If you can think of a communications satellite that has something like USB ports – a standard interface – where we can attach payloads, upgrade and replace them,” Tadros said. “That is absolutely the platform of the future.”