UK Company Sends Factory With 1,000C Furnace Into Space (bbc.com) 56
A UK-based company has successfully powered up a microwave-sized space factory in orbit, proving it can run a 1,000C furnace to manufacture ultra-pure semiconductor materials in microgravity. "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." The BBC reports: 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 company's mini-factory launched on a SpaceX rocket in the summer. Since then the team has been testing its systems from their mission control in Cardiff. Veronica Viera, the company's payload operations lead, shows us an image that the satellite beamed back from space. It's taken from the inside of the furnace, and shows plasma - gas heated to about 1,000C -- glowing brightly. [...]
The team is now planning to build a bigger space factory -- one that could make semiconductor material for 10,000 chips. They also need to test the technology to bring the material back to Earth. On a future mission, a heat shield named Pridwen after the legendary shield of King Arthur will be deployed to protect the spacecraft from the intense temperatures it will experience as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere.
[...] The company's mini-factory launched on a SpaceX rocket in the summer. Since then the team has been testing its systems from their mission control in Cardiff. Veronica Viera, the company's payload operations lead, shows us an image that the satellite beamed back from space. It's taken from the inside of the furnace, and shows plasma - gas heated to about 1,000C -- glowing brightly. [...]
The team is now planning to build a bigger space factory -- one that could make semiconductor material for 10,000 chips. They also need to test the technology to bring the material back to Earth. On a future mission, a heat shield named Pridwen after the legendary shield of King Arthur will be deployed to protect the spacecraft from the intense temperatures it will experience as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere.
Do they deliver ? (Score:1)
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Re:Do they deliver Space Pizza? (Score:1)
Proof [reddit.com]
Re: UK -manufacturing- something? (Score:1)
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Re:UK -manufacturing- something? (Score:5, Informative)
Your mistake is reading the Daily Mail and listening to Farage pretending that manufacturing in the UK doesn't exist, when instead it is the 3rd largest industry, employing nearly 3 million people and contributing hundreds of billions of pounds to the economy.
There's more to the world than your shitty little made in China phone.
Cutting edge only (Score:4, Interesting)
Just thinking of the costs of having to lift all the supply materials to the orbit alone is making me have a headache.
If this is really something that can make unique, cutting edge stuff that cannot be made on the surface, this will probably be worth it.
Otherwise, it's difficult to see the cost equation making sense. Though to be fair, SpaceX may have yet another massive reduction in orbit access costs, which may drop them so low that it will become profitable.
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And I wonder about the amount of CO2 those rockets would emit.
Most rockets these days run on fossil fuels, massive amounts of fossil fuels.
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I find that the right wing has gone so far down the rabbit hole now that I have no fucking clue what you're even referring to.
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Yeah, everyone else is in a bubble except you. Sure...
But if you're not on the right when you grow up, you have no brain.
The right is philosophically incoherent and has no real direction except a miscellaneous grab bag of misanthropic ideas. Except for one thing which appears universal.
And that's pointing and yelling about how someone else is bad for doing something you're doing.
So if the right is telling me I have no brain, I can rest assured that all they're doing is trying to distract everyone (including
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Except me and hundreds of millions of others on X alone. We're not going to talk about youtube views, much less CNN views, Fox views, etc. They spent a lot of time regurgitating relevant talking points on their side.
When you consider this leftist moral panic is so bad, it actually hit national news here across the Atlantic, and yet you have been kept in the dark, your bubble is positively tiny and very, very extreme left. As even far leftists have been talking about mass Somali fraud and how they must be pr
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Except me and hundreds of millions of others on X alone.
Is that some kind of defense against something?
When you consider this leftist moral panic is so bad,
You're speaking rightwing-nutcase-ese again, not English. In conventional English, people don't automatically know what weird piece of niche political fantasy is in your head and you actually need to tell people what you're talking about.
So I say again: what the actual fuck are you talking about? It's really no use blabbering references to talking points
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I know. Leftism can only survive in a total propaganda bubble.
This is why the old saying is that if you're not on the left when young, you have no heart. But if you're not on the right when you grow up, you have no brain.
That's not the saying. It's from the 1800's and it's originally:
"Celui qui n'est pas républicain à vingt ans fait douter de la générosité de son âme; mais celui qui, après trente ans, persévère, fait douter de la rectitude de son esprit.”
He who is not a republican at twenty years old casts doubt on the generosity of his soul; but he who, after thirty years, perseveres, casts doubt on the soundness of his mind.
More modern versions use liberal and conservativ
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In the right-wing nut-o-sphere, they've apparently decided that Somali child care facilities are all money-laundering fronts.
So there are now some creepy guys posting videos where they 'investigate' by showing up day care centers and asking "where are the children?"
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Well that's new. Thanks for explaining. Apparently Luckyo didn't feel confident enough in his lunacy to expose it to scrutiny, but espouses it nonetheless.
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Not all. I'm sure we can find at least a couple that aren't.
Granted, considering that Somali are both the most clannish of peoples in the world, and also the most violent (the only ones more violent are Palestinians according to Danish numbers, and these two massive outliers even compared to MENAPT peoples), even a couple that don't do what is the primary form of securing funds for the people from stupid sub-humans will probably be a struggle.
As in Somali culture, to not secure funds for the people from the
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In the right-wing nut-o-sphere, they've apparently decided that Somali child care facilities are all money-laundering fronts.
If the mainstream media could flood the zone with hours of footage of happy Somalian children attending these can't-answer-the-phone fraudsters' "facilities" they would. But they can't. And the silence is deafening.
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For the umpteenth fucking time the "Mainstream Media" is not a loony-right-wing-conspiracy debunking organization. It's a group of outlets owned by billionaires and, less frequently than in the past, giant corporations, who have no interest in truth, just serving a demographic, and most of them repeat the same shit Fox News does, and if they don't they usually are talking about other topics.
You don't know this, because you don't actually follow the MSM, you just assume what's said on various right wing site
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In the long run, we would be getting that supply from the Moon or asteroids. This initial step is needed though, but I don't see it being profitable.
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It's not like it's super-hot... (Score:2)
Well, that isn't too hot. My kiln, in my barn, was running a firing last night that got just about that hot for cone 6 pottery and it can do cone 10, even hotter.
It'll take more than a furnace that can do what the average potter's kiln can do before it sounds impressive.
Re:It's not like it's super-hot... (Score:4, Informative)
As a side note: ChatGPT is a better search engine than Google by far.
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ChatGPT is a better search engine than Google by far.
I think this is actually why giants like google have been enshitifying search engines, to promote the use of AI which provides better results.
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I think this is actually why giants like google have been enshitifying search engines, to promote the use of AI which provides better results.
It does? Google's own AI proves that's not true. If you search for things you know about then you quickly find that it comes up with total bullshit, and if you click on the "citation" links and if you can read then you quickly find out that its citations don't actually say what they claim they say.
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> I think this is actually why giants like google have been enshitifying search engines, to promote the use of AI which provides better results.
I think you misread what you quoted. They didn't say (paraphrased) "AI was better than search engines", they said (paraphrased) "A rival to Gemini is better than Gemini".
I have no idea, to be honest, they're both fucking awful.
Google search was enshittified much earlier than Gemini, it was already falling apart in the 2010s, it's largely remained popular because
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Can't they send the thing somewhere b/w Earth and Venus, to achieve that temperature w/o needing any fuel from earth? Once it is the right distance from the sun, have it stop at that "radius" and then just revolve around the sun accordingly?
5G tower? (Score:2)
I'm guessing maybe a 6G or 7G tower. 5G is today's technology, it's not relevant for tomorrow's manufacturing.
Re:5G tower? [OrangeGPT response] (Score:2)
"My tower has 666G's, the most eeever, everyone says so! It has so many G's it bruises my hands. It spews G's like Joe's autopen spews fake signatures, so lame, but I use my G's for the power of good instead. 'Good' starts with G, I bet I'm the first to notice that, I have a keen eye for such things, everyone's amazed, even Harvard professors, which I'm arresting by the way for spreading anti-semicolons, Bibi and I strongly hate that."
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'Good' starts with G, I bet I'm the first to notice that
I think Scott Adams has you beat: https://mobilesyrup.com/2011/0... [mobilesyrup.com]
How could it be worth it? (Score:2)
The purer and more ordered a semiconductor is, the better it works.
From a business perspective, how could this possibly be worth the investment required to manufacture them in orbit? Economically, it seems this would need to result in performance gains that exceed those made on Earth by a significant margin. The only other possibility I can think of is that the resulting chips have a quality about them that a specific fields requires that cannot be had any other way.
If this were just a simple science experiment then this would all make sense. However, this is a business ve
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" they think this can be profitable at some point." or it could be an attempt to hoover up gullible "investors" and their money. In the next iteration, they should offer Fusion Power.....with AI.....and crypto-coins....and valuable scarce minerals and oil, then it would be shoo-in for el Bunko plunking down American taxpayer money to take a stake in the venture.
IIRC Russians did this on Mir (Score:2)
I recall the Russians already did this on their Mir space station. It's technically interesting in that it's easier to get a completely defect-free silicon crystal in microgravity, but it's too expensive to be practical for volume production. I guess it's nice that we can still reproduce it using technology a few decades newer.
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It might be worth it for R&D of new materials manufactured in space. Using these materials for production may be some time away, but eventually it will happen, so whoever gets an early start may have a windfall later on.
My question is why would a company use Space Forge, as an intermediary, instead of contracting directly with Space X? Wouldn't a customer want to have full control of the manufacturing process, with their own proprietary equipment?
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So they're not tied to SpaceX? So they can use other company's launch vehicles?
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performance or yield, combined...
Not quite right.. (Score:2)
Spacccce Forrrrrge (Score:2)
Their advertising has a first stage boost.
Not a very good pitch (Score:2)
Instead of 5G towers, car chargers etc you should just say "we can do RAM this way".
That's more than enough to get the entire planet hyped given the current state of affairs.
King Arthur had a shield? (Score:2)
Since when did King Arthur ever have a shield? Sure, he had the sword Excalibur that he pulled from the stone, but I can't recall ever seeing any books or movies depict him with a shield, any shield, at all. Especially not a named shield. Guess all the media production decided to drop it and just stick with the Sword.
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It doesn't feature in the John Boorman film, but it's certainly a feature of one strand of the King Arthur myth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
(I would assume it's merely a detail in the original stories, as it's rather obvious Arthur *would* have a shield, but all focus would be on Excalibur because of its origins and its link to Arthur himself and his powers.)