Space Exploration

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on earth. Other processes which benefit from a lack of gravity include welding, crystal growth, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, non linear optic and photonic materials.

Contamination:

Space is a sterile environment. Sensitive production such as semi conductors and biotech would benefit from not having to use expensive equipment to filter out harmful dust which is so prevalent on the Earth.

Disadvantages

The major disadvantage to manufacturing in space is cost. Currently all space bound vehicles are government owned. Fee structures for sending materials into space are exorbitant and delivery service is both uncertain and infrequent.

It costs approximately $20,000.00 per pound to send materials into space currently. Although NASA's goal is to get the cost down to $100.00 per pound it is not likely that this will happen any time soon.

Scheduling also remains a problem. The current shuttle fleet flies about 7 missions per year compared to a goal of once per ...

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