In-Space Manufacturing, which can be defined as the processing of materials (brought from Earth or sourced from space) into parts, products, or infrastructure, directly in space, is expected to be an important component and an enabler of the emerging in-space economy.
The capability to manufacture spacecraft hardware directly in space can represent a paradigm change for space activities, opening up a number of possibilities for spacecraft design and performance improvement.
By alleviating limitations associated to the fairing size and the launch phase loads, significantly larger and lighter spacecraft structures are enabled. This can lead to higher payload capacity from larger solar arrays, higher data throughput from larger antennas or enhanced science mission return from larger aperture telescopes. Altogether, allowing a higher performance-to-launch-cost ratio, and introducing the possibility of in-space repair and later recycling, foster increased sustainability of future space activities, in a wide range of applications for telecommunications, Earth observation, navigation, or science.
In the field of human and robotic exploration, manufacturing in space enables on-demand production of infrastructure and hardware at the exploration destination, including with locally available resources. This reduces the required needed amount of spares, simplifies mission logistics and significantly improves the sustainability of the missions.
Leveraging the unique characteristics of the space environment, such as prolonged microgravity and hard vacuum, products with properties not achievable on Earth could be produced, including optical fibres, semiconductors or specialty alloys, with applications in high performance computing or high temperature aeronautic components. This opens attractive prospects for commercialisation of high added value products on Earth.
Realising the promise of this new paradigm for the various applications requires a number of technological elements to be advanced, including manufacturing processes and fabrication equipment which can operate in space conditions, in-situ validation methods and design guidelines for the products and structures manufactured in space. Such an endeavour is multi-disciplinary by nature and covers a range of scales, from system-level to material-level developments.