Image: Gravitics

Manufacturing and servicing facilities in space are (finally) moving from the pages of science fiction to reality. For decades, we've seen movies with scenes of spacecraft being created and serviced in beautifully rendered factories with Earth in the background. And many more ideas have come from authors imagining bold futures where humanity does everything from creating giant nets of satellites to massive, spinning space stations. Some might lament that, back in reality, we’ve come so far with our achievements in space yet fallen short of the brightest visions. How can we have landed on the Moon 50 years ago and still be scrapping billion-dollar satellites when they run out of fuel? However, there’s good reason to believe that the space industry is almost done laying the foundations that will let us move from science fiction to engineering reality.

Consider the paths that all other mass-produced vehicles have blazed. Moving from a few bespoke cars to thousands and then millions created a parallel move from small, local companies to the rise of distributed manufacturing and service industries in locations optimized in large part for economic efficiency. Aviation, watercraft, and trains follow the same path: market forces demand that we minimize costs by localizing and automating the way we manufacture and service vehicles.

In the space industry, it’s likely to remain most cost-efficient to manufacture most satellites here on Earth in the near term. There are just too many benefits to teams that can build, test, and iterate before shipping for launch. There are outliers, though, that would strongly benefit or even require space manufacturing. Examples include large membrane optics, gossamer structures, and systems too large for a single launch.

Servicing in Space

Servicing is where we’re likely to see innovations in the near term. For instance, imagine if every time your car ran out of fuel, you left it on the side of the highway and bought a new car. The idea is ridiculous, yet it’s what we do in the space industry. It’s even worse, though, because even a tiny CubeSat can cost $500K. For satellites that cost $500M+, it would be more analogous to say that we’d build a new factory to create a single car every time we ran out of gas.

So why, if servicing makes so much sense, aren’t there a bunch of servicing stations already buzzing around in low-Earth orbit?

To be trite about it: space is hard. Generations of teams have crunched the numbers and not gotten past fundamental blockers like low speed and intermittent communications, unsophisticated robotics, and launch mass limits. How can you assemble a satellite if you only get to look at choppy video streams eight minutes at a time?

There are also chicken and egg problems. Yes, extending spacecraft life would be great, but who sets standards? Integrating a refueling port adds complexity (cost), risk (cost), and time (cost). And what happens if the servicing company goes bankrupt and your investment is wasted? On the other side of the coin, why should a servicing industry develop if no one will pay for services?

Peeking into the Future

Fortunately, momentum is building. We find a confluence of three factors that create opportunities which have never existed together: 1) major technical blockers are falling, 2) government regulations are tightening, and 3) investors are betting big. Taken together, we believe that it’s reasonable to expect that the first satellite will be entirely assembled and launched from a dedicated orbital platform, that the first commercial refueling will take place, and that the return of products manufactured in space will become commonplace, all by the end of the decade.

Technical Roadblocks are Falling: Much has been said about StarShip, Vulcan, and New Glenn and their new launch mass capabilities. You need to launch tens, maybe hundreds, of metric tons for a manufacturing facility. And servicing systems need metric tons of propellants both for maneuvering and fueling.

Regulations are Tightening: Dish Network was fined $150K in 2023 for leaving their dead satellite in a useful orbit. More rules are coming not only for space junk but also for communications, maneuverability, and mission approval. Another example: the FCC has dropped the post-mission disposal allowable from 25 years to just five years.

Investors are Betting Big: Gravitics is an investor-backed company joined by like-minded companies such as Axiom, Orbit Fab, Astroscale, Atomos, Starfish, and Varda. For Gravitics part, we’ve raised tens of millions of dollars, manufactured and tested 4-m to 8-m diameter pressure vessels, and developed key systems such as propulsion, batteries, and shielding. Gravitics has also been awarded a $1.7M Space Force contract to mature our modules as tactically responsive platforms that enable new mission applications.

With technical foundations and economic, regulatory, and engineering motivations coming together, what can we expect manufacturing and servicing capabilities to look like? Peeking into the future, we present two images bracketing use cases.

Figure 1: A StarMax human-tended facility ready to be tailored for a customer’s manufacturing and servicing needs. (Image: Gravitics)

Figure 1 is an example of a human-tended manufacturing space. We’ve provided a breakroom table on the right-hand side to give you a sense of scale. In this example, the module is split into two levels and we kept the volumes open so that manufacturers can kit it out with the robotics, instruments, and other equipment they need. The walls are packed with canvas boxes representing storage. The overall goal here is to make this a work site (crew sleep in a different module), but we’ve made it comfortable with a bathroom, break room, and soft walls.

Figure 2: StarMax kitted as a primarily robotics-tended foundry. (Image: Gravitics)

Figure 2 is in stark contrast, though, with a large forge intended for rare visits by humans. Forging aluminum, for instance, requires about 660 °C and it would be better for safety and thermal reasons to isolate the process. Instead, robotic arms are included for remote operation. We also provide a large volume in front of the forge so that manufacturers can kit it out with post-forging equipment such as extruders and storage racks. The left side of the image shows storage bottles for the forging process. Advanced alloy production can even occur in vacuum to minimize heat transfer and oxidation, with an atmosphere introduced only when humans need to enter the module. A setup like this could also be useful for asteroid mining, on-orbit recycling, and as a biomedical reactor.

The video shows a number of other industrial and hospitality layouts. Our team has a lot of fun listening to customers and rendering these concepts. At the same time, it’s serious engineering and we believe that this is the generation that’s going to build from these new foundations into a bold future both exciting and necessary.

It no longer requires the imagination of Arthur C. Clarke to see where the space industry is headed. We need only to look at every other system of vehicles, appreciate the falling technical roadblocks, and observe the regulations and resources environment. It is with confidence that we ask not, “if?” but, “when?” We invite you to consider, “what’s next?” because almost anything becomes possible with the right foundations in place.

This article was written by Dr. Bill Tandy, Chief Technology Officer, Gravitics, Inc. (Marysville, WA). For more information, visit here  .