
Optical fibre made in orbit should be better than the terrestrial sort - godelmachine
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/09/08/optical-fibre-made-in-orbit-should-be-better-than-the-terrestrial-sort
======
nicktelford
> To say that this is truly an economic process is cheating slightly, since
> the ledger fails to account for the trivial matter of the $100bn or so spent
> to build the space station in the first place.

The ISS is a laboratory, I don't think it's fair to consider its cost as a
factor here in the same way you don't consider the cost of the University
campus for other research.

I highly doubt they'll be doing full-scale manufacturing on the ISS. They'll
be using it (as it was designed) to conduct experiments on their technology
and prove that it can be done. Only then will the real investment will begin
where they construct dedicated manufacturing facilities.

I wonder if this would be an opportunity for Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable
modules?

~~~
HeadsUpHigh
>I wonder if this would be an opportunity for Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable
modules?

Not just Bigelow but many other space startups. SpaceX is dominating the news
atm with Blue Origin to follow but the reality is that the big bucks are in
space activities not space transportation. This is only now starting to be
realized with companies deploying fleets of cubesats for Earth observation but
in the next decade there are plenty of companies that are looking to build
commercial space stations. Some of these projects are more conservative, like
using technology proven on the ISS coupled with cheaper components and more
streamlined operations. These 2 factors combined with the fact that these are
not cost plus contracts with the government mean at least an order of
magnitude of cost savings. Then there is Bigelow who wants to move to the next
stage of inflatables but also the Gateway foundation who want to launch the
materials in space and assemble a huge station there. Everybody is waiting for
the price per kg to drop to a certain threshold and then cheap human
transportation to be made available. Crew Dragon is probably the first step
towards that that might enable some small station but the big deal is BFR(
when and if it launches).

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _the big bucks are in space activities not space transportation_

This is an opinion, not a fact. They are presently in transportation.
Moreover, the space mining and manufacturing pitch has been made (incorrectly)
for at least forty years. I have yet to see a convincing business model for
any of these activities, even assuming cheaper launch costs.

~~~
frgewut
Actually launch industry is minuscule compared to satellites ($5.5B for launch
industry vs $13B only for satellite manufacturing)

Edit: and then of course there is the satellites services which the report
estimates in hundreds of billions $.

[1] [https://www.sia.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/SIA-
SSIR-2017...](https://www.sia.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/SIA-
SSIR-2017.pdf)

~~~
nscalf
42% is minuscule? They have reasonably comparable market caps considering the
amount of time the industries have existed. The commercial launch industry
really is in it's first/second decade (arguable depending on what you define
as commercial, this field is radically changing), and you can trace satellite
commercial use back decades to the 70's with GPS and telecom (the first
satellite tv use was in 1978 for reference).

~~~
barbecue_sauce
Even by their original figures, wouldn't it be 30%? 5.5B/(5.5B + 13B)?

~~~
perl4ever
The point is, to some people "miniscule" implies different orders of
magnitude.

------
barbegal
The $1 million per km figure is of course complete rubbish. That's just the
cost scientists have had to pay to fabricate it using the zero-g plane. There
is no commercial application where the demand is that high.

The best commercial application for this type of fibre is a transatlantic
crossing. In these applications typically 4 to 8 fibres are used and the
distance is 7000km so the total length of fibre is around 50000km. For this
sort of application the fibre cost needs to come in at around the $100 million
dollar mark which is just $2k per km. To create a single km of cable in ZBLAN
you need about 300g of feed-stock. So the revenue per kg is around $6k. This
is below the current cost of around $10k per kg cost of sending payloads to
orbit.

~~~
walrus01
The cost of the raw ultra low loss single mode fiber (9/125 on a spool) for a
transatlantic crossing is negligible, it's the cost of the cable when it's
fully integrated as a cable with jacket, copper for repeater power, etc. And
then the bulk of the cost is actually the massive engineering project that
involves repeaters, possibly branching units, cable ships, ROVs, plows,
divers, beach work, cable landing stations. I would guess that the fiber
strands are way less than 2% of the total capex spent.

------
hwillis
According to the originating NASA/UAH paper[1], where they took a fiber-making
machine into their microgravity-simulating plane, gravity causes tiny amounts
of convection inside the molten fiber. That's why you can't just float the
fiber on air or something. Their guess is that the convection creates tiny
little circular currents in the glass that are really excellent at causing
crystal nucleation.

The core problem is that ZBLAN glass needs to be cooled down very quickly to
solidify in the amorphous state. Drawing a fiber demands that you do it quite
slowly to get a quality, consistent fiber. Drawing is not a technology that is
going to improve hugely any time soon- it's too fundamental. Instead you need
the microgravity to give you a little extra time to draw the fiber to the
required quality.

[1]:
[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8087775_Effects_of_...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8087775_Effects_of_Gravity_on_ZBLAN_Glass_Crystallization)

~~~
rubatuga
Why don’t they just draw the fiber straight down? Problem solved!

~~~
barbegal
The glass is still going to be under the act of gravity and will form
convection loops but in a different direction to the loops if drawn
horizontally.

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ovi256
I'm glad to see this evolution become true. It's such a trope in SF literature
that it's been the plot trigger of the latest Andy Weir novel, Artemis.

~~~
fredsir
Which is a great book, by the way, that I highly recommend anyone who likes
science, space and, a good heist, to read.

~~~
neilsimp1
Seconded. The main character came off a lot like Mark Watney from The Martian,
but what a great, quick read Artemis was.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
Also an _Excellent_ listen, the voice acting is superb.

------
crispyambulance
I reached my "article limit" for the month, but it makes me wonder, HOW MUCH
better could optical fiber be if made in zero-gravity?

Presumably it's all about material purity and accurate/consistent geometry of
the fiber itself and the doping profile for refractive index cross-section.

If it were "perfect" how much better would the fiber be? Double the reach? So
you cut in half the cost of repeaters/re-generators on long-haul links. Those
are definitely expensive, but I think space flight is quite "up there" in cost
too.

~~~
close04
> zero-gravity

There's a common misconception that LEO has zero gravity. You're barely off
the ground so to speak and gravity is almost the same as on the surface. The
difference is that you're constantly falling so you experience weightlessness.

So you are experiencing zero-g, not 0 gravity. You'd be hard pressed to go
anywhere with an absence of gravity acting in that spot.

This being said the question is if the quality increase justifies the price
(even for a hypothetical future mass implementation). Plenty of products get
incremental upgrades, it doesn't have to be a massive jump. Again, if you can
justify the cost.

~~~
smartscience
> You'd be hard pressed to go anywhere with an absence of gravity acting in
> that spot.

Okay I think I've found somewhere, but I'm not sure. What experiment should I
perform to test that gravity is really absent?

~~~
close04
Given the size of the universe and the fact that it's not entirely observable
makes it... impractical to even consider measuring gravity. Where we can
measure it it's done with accelerometers or doppler shift and measuring the
orbital perturbation [0]. Objects close to home are studied more intensely.

You can't really conclude there is no gravity acting in some random point
across the universe but you can use other methods to determine when it _is_
acting even if you have no chance of putting an instrument there. Like
gravitational lensing. [1]

There's definitely not enough space in a comment to discuss general relativity
and measuring gravity of an object in free fall. But if you're curious for
more and have time to read Wikipedia has one of the most accessible
explanations that don't involve a pile of imperfect or misleading analogies.
[2]

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMdjAKn_uXw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMdjAKn_uXw)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity)

------
walrus01
From the perspective of an ISP that buys a lot of many different types of
singlemode fiber optic cable: This is cool and all, but we care about dollars
per meter for cable purchase orders.

Until the cost per kilogram of launching stuff into orbit is drastically
reduced (think: massive fleets of 100% reusable BFR-sized rockets sending
stuff into LEO on a regularly scheduled basis), I don't see how this will have
a real world application outside of special non-profit, government funded R&D
projects.

------
gamesbrainiac
This is quite interesting, the plot of Artemis by Andy Weir which is basically
about a company trying to make fibre-glass in space might actually seem
plausible.

~~~
lucb1e
Andy Weir and Daniel Suarez have a habit of using things in their books that
you see on the news as new technology two weeks or months later. It's a little
scary sometimes to see one of Suarez' thrillers show up in real life, and it
takes me a bit to adjust to it being real without the dystopia.

------
mooreds
I remember reading "The Third Industrial Revolution" [0] in my childhood,
which was a paean to all the different industrial processes that would be
possible in space. One that I remember was alloys of metals with vastly
different weights (lithium and lead, for example). In gravity it's hard to mix
them perfectly because the heavier metal sinks, but that is not an issue in
space.

Would be fun to read it again and see what predictions, if any, came true.

0: [https://www.amazon.com/third-industrial-revolution-Harry-
Sti...](https://www.amazon.com/third-industrial-revolution-Harry-
Stine/dp/0441806643/)

~~~
antt
Given that there is no industry in space I'd guess none.

~~~
abecedarius
I dimly remember that that book presumed launches would get much cheaper and
more frequent. To be fair, before the shuttle flew there'd been inflated
promises, and aerospace had progressed really fast in the preceding decades.
It was a little like someone in 2000 thinking Dennard scaling wasn't about to
hit the wall -- it's easy to think that was dumb in hindsight.

------
TheRealPomax
I think I'm missing a key piece in this article: it does not seem to explain
why current fiber would be bad enough to need this, given its already
incredible carrying capacity, even with loss due to imperfections and
unintentional impurities. Without this, this just reads as "some people want
to burn money for no good reason, yet again demonstrating that vanity non-
problems are what gets you the headlines". Maybe it is, maybe it's not, but
the article doesn't seem to clarify.

~~~
fpoling
The current fiber requires multiple amplifiers across the ocean. The space
fiber may allow to get away from it making it much easier to lay and maintain
transocean cables.

~~~
TheRealPomax
Why would amplifiers make it harder to lay cable? You generally don't want one
giant uninterrupted piece of cable over huge distances, even if it's a perfect
cable, exactly because that makes it easier to do maintenance.

------
dsr_
If the cooling can be done sufficiently quickly, it would be cheaper to make
this stuff using a technique that Corning (maker of about 13% of all glass
fiberoptics) has used for quite some time: producing it at the top of a tower
and letting it drop and cool in free fall.

~~~
hwillis
Got a link?

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Terr_
That reminds me of ZAFO (Zero Attenuation Optical Fiber), a plot-devices in
the book Artemis by Andy Weir.

------
bayesian_horse
Manufacturing in space could have a lot of applications... but it's such a
pain to get stuff into orbit and back.

~~~
Robotbeat
SpaceX intends to get costs down to about $10/kg to LEO using BFR, almost as
cheap as long haul air cargo. That is 2-3 orders of magnitude improvement and
changes a lot of calculations.

~~~
bayesian_horse
The next calculation is how LEO transfers affects the environment/climate over
the long term, when you begin using it as much as long haul air cargo...

~~~
Robotbeat
Not likely.

------
verelo
I suspect one day, in a distant future, we will discuss the issues of
manufacturing with external forces ie gravity, and how only the best products
can be made in environments we 100% control.

------
djbelieny
SPOILER ALERT: Sounds like the plot of the sci-fi book Artemis by Andy Weir.
Great Book and there's also a kick ass Audible version read by Rosario Dawson

------
mrfusion
Any idea how gravity is the limiting factor in producing this?

The article mentions stress. But why?

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thinkcontext
Is it known if ZBLAN can survive re-entry stresses?

~~~
hwillis
Inside a capsule? Sure, no problem. The issue with gravity is only during the
very brief period when it is cooling from molten to glass phase.

------
village-idiot
Finally, that particular sci-fi trope is becoming real.

------
baldfat
> It is a glass, made from a mixture of the fluorides of zirconium, barium,
> lanthanum, aluminium and sodium, that is therefore known as ZBLAN (sodium
> has the chemical symbol Na).

Acronyms!!! I know it is weird to bring this up but there is no NA in ZBLAN!
It is AN and doesn't represent Sodium.

Would be neat if we could find a bunch of cases like this and give reason why
we can expand into space manufacturing and a moon base. I doubt we will see
this in our life times. I just can't see the financial benefit unless it is
100% automated.

~~~
rovek
They seem to be using Na as a justification for using N, since the other
chemical symbols don't match the acronym either. Unless they're just using the
first letter of each symbol, either way it's not a great name.

~~~
chrismorgan
If you use the Latin name for sodium, it flows much more clearly:

ZBLAN: Zirconium, Barium, Lanthanum, Aluminium, Natrium.

My grandmother, who was a pharmacist, prefers to call it natrium rather than
sodium. I don’t know if there are any industries or similar where it’s
commonly called natrium.

The sentence would have read better if the aside had instead been rendered
“(sodium is also known as natrium)” or similar.

~~~
plopz
Fun fact that I recently learned, the person who named aluminum was Humphry
Davy and he originally suggested "alumium" but ended up choosing "aluminum".

~~~
ConceptJunkie
It would be interesting to find out how that became "aluminium" in England.
Perhaps they were more interested in retaining the "ium" suffix.

~~~
lorenzhs
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Etymology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Etymology)

