
Humanity's Biggest Machines Will Be Built in Space - rbanffy
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/satellites/a16867551/machines-built-in-space/
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pasabagi
I've thought for a long time that colonization will probably never take off,
but space industry is absolutely a good idea.

Building colonies on mars is sort of like building colonies in Death Valley,
or in the Marina trench, or inside the reactor cupola of Chernobyl. You could
probably do it, but it's expensive, and nobody in their right mind would come.
Once you've spent a ton of fuel getting out of a gravity well, you'd be insane
to go down another one, especially if the only thing you're going to get from
it is radiation poisoning.

Space, on the other hand, offers some really interesting opportunities for
manufacturing. It's effectively a gigantic clean-room, allowing for a whole
load of processes you can't do on earth - like no-heat welding.

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IntronExon
Gigantic clean-room _under vacuum_ you don’t have to expend energy to
maintain! As you say, it has immense potential. Temperature fluctuations
between dark and Illuminatated by sunlight is one challenge, but also a
potential feature. Heat dissipation is another challenge, but could also be a
feature.

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IntronExon
Not for a very long time, if we’re counting the LHC as a machine. We’re really
nowhere near building something larger than that offworld, although if we
focused vast amounts of time and money on it we probably could. Right now our
investment is minimal, and only the private sector (focused on launching
payloads into LEO) is moving forward with a budget. NASA’s program is focused
primarily on robotic exploration, and astronomy.

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dogma1138
Indeed we’re nowhere near building anything in space we can barely manage to
3d print a wrench in space.

We’re likely going to be manufacturing things on mars or Luna before we’re
going to have decent micro gravity manufacturing capacity.

We haven’t even began exploring the challenges and opportunities of building
things in micro gravity scaling it up to the biggest machines ever made isn’t
going to happen any time soon.

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IntronExon
We have a long way to go yeah, and it’s a strong reason to keep R&D funded in
that arena. We won’t be able to just muscle our way through it, and the time
may come when we need a good corpus of research in a hurry. Luna seems like a
good compromise for now, with low g, proximity to Earth, and an environment we
don’t mind taking risks with.

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senectus1
except for the dust problem.

Space you dont have that problem, on the moon that shit is really destructive
and pervasive.

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IntronExon
That’s true, but we could lay down a barrier over a large area, or maybe glass
it. The virtue of it having an insignificant atmosphere is that the regolith
won’t blow around and get into things. Still, it’s a challenge!

