How Space Manufacturing Will Change Everything?

Blue Origin and Boeing are going to build an Orbital Reef space station.

It's like a working space up in low earth orbit where people can do science experiments and manufacturing.

This opens up fields like bioengineering, 3D printing, and manufacturing of high tech infrastructure like fiber optics and sustainable energy.

A fluoride glass material called zeblan could be used to make the most efficient high capacity fiber optic material in the world, but only when it's made in microgravity.

Zeblan is prone to crystallization during the cooling process, and these defects prevent the material from reaching its full potential.

This could make Z Bland valuable enough to become the first material to be manufactured in space and sold on Earth .

An Arch not enabled system on a space station would triple the deployed surface area of the solar array.

And all of this would come at a drastically reduced launch cost.

Because we're building in space, not on Earth , we aren't constrained by forces like gravity.

It's believed that we can 3D print structures in space that are up to 7 kilometers in length.