This paper addresses the factors influencing the costs of transporting and operating factories in space and offers approaches for minimizing the effect of these costs on the finished product. In particular, the trade-off between operating entirely on the shuttle versus setting up on a free-flying platform is explored, with examples given for hypothetical pharmaceutical and crystal manufacturing processes. It is clear that the incremental costs of manufacturing in space are enormous, with unit product costs ranging from nearly a million dollars per kilogram to nearly a billion dollars per kilogram, using shuttle sortie operations. This high incremental cost can be reduced by a factor of two or more by selective use of a free-flying space platform and leaving some or most of the factory on-orbit. This allows for both a more favorable mass fraction, thus reducing shuttle transportation costs per unit of product, and for an extended processing period using the free-flyer's capacity to provide greater electrical energy to achieve increased production.
Economic considerations of space manufacturing
Oekonomische Ueberlegungen zur Fertigung im Weltraum
1984
5 Seiten, 1 Bild, 2 Tabellen
Conference paper
English
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