Business Heads for Zero Gravity

By John S. DeMott

Before long, new plants may be built in the wild blue yonder

Stowed away unobtrusively aboard the Discovery shuttle last week were six stainless-steel chemical reactors, each about the size of a football. In them, Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing was conducting an experiment that was not as spectacular as the main mission of retrieving crippled satellites, but potentially no less important. The company was studying how organic crystals grow in orbit. By combining chemicals in containers in the weightlessness of space, 3M's scientists were hoping to make crystals purer than any on earth.

Would 3M's experiments help improve some of its products? Could future space research yield a thinner, tougher Scotch tape? Perhaps. The only thing that 3M knows for certain is that the promise of manufacturing in space is enormous. So great is it, says Christopher Podsiadly, director of 3M's science research lab, that "we have to keep changing our expectations."

With NASA's encouragement, 3M is one of several companies looking to orbital factories as a place to conduct experiments. This high frontier, as some visionaries call it, could be the arena of the next industrial revolution. The Center for Space Policy in Cambridge, Mass., predicts that by the year 2000 space industries could annually produce $27 billion in Pharmaceuticals to combat cancer and emphysema, $3.1 billion in gallium arsenide semiconductors for electronics, and $11.5 billion worth of incredibly pure glass for optical purposes.

Such products are made possible by space's environment of near total vacuum and near zero gravity. Those conditions cannot be easily duplicated on earth, and they permit heretofore impossible experiments and manufacturing processes. In space, an oil-and-vinegar salad dressing stays perfectly mixed because there is no gravity to pull the ingredients apart. Mixed the same way, superstrong metal alloys could be made in the absence of gravity's pull. Unlike oil and vinegar, the new alloys would then stay together after their return to earth. Deere & Co., the Illinois tractor maker, is investigating the impact of zero gravity on the molecular structure of iron. That could provide clues to making it stronger on earth. The next generation of supercomputers that make billions of calculations per second may use chips that will be born in orbit. Reason: space appears to be the place to produce ultra-pure crystals, free of defects caused by gravity, that can replace conventional silicon chips.

The 3M company is looking to space as a sort of annex to plants it already has in the U.S. In October 3M announced an ambitious ten-year plan to conduct experiments on 72 shuttle flights through the mid-1990s, right on up to NASA's proposed $8 billion space station. On the ground at its campus-like headquarters in St. Paul, 3M has set up a space research and applications laboratory staffed with 15 chemists, physicists and engineers. The firm will probably spend about $8 million on the project next year, although the operation is so new that the company has not yet drawn up a formal budget. In its deal with NASA, 3M would get a free ride into space for its future shuttle experiments, as long as it agrees to make its findings public. It will begin paying NASA after products emerge.

Alongside 3M in business ventures in orbit is McDonnell Douglas, the St. Louis aerospace company. The firm has long made propulsion systems and other hardware for the U.S. space program and the shuttle. On five nights earlier this year, McDonnell Douglas and Johnson & Johnson, the New Jersey medical-supply company, ran electrophoresis experiments, which allowed precise separation under weightless conditions of biological materials. Although one batch was contaminated, the others permitted the removal of impurities too small to be extracted on earth. One possible outgrowth: production of insulin-producing cells to control diabetes. Says Isaac Gillam, the NASA official in charge of commercial programs: "We will see products manufactured in space from the McDonnell Douglas and Johnson & Johnson effort as soon as early 1986."

One made-in-space product, tiny latex balls only a bit larger than a red blood cell, will soon go on sale. Formed in the near weightlessness of orbit in April 1983 on the Challenger shuttle flight, each of the 1,000 or so samples is exactly ten microns in diameter. Their precise uniformity makes them suitable for calibrating medical and scientific equipment or possibly destroying cancer cells. Price of the microscopic spheres: $350 to $400 each.

Some experts are skeptical as to just how much corporations can get out of space. Costs are literally astronomical. Rental of work space on a space platform in the next decade could run to $50 million a year. NASA's own proposed pricing schedule, which has not yet been approved by the Government, calls for a fee of $71 million for renting the shuttle's full payload for each flight up to 1988, and perhaps $100 million after that. NASA is mindful of competition from launch vehicles like the European Space Agency's Ariane series (see following story), which charges $25 million to $30 million to put satellites in orbit.

No extensive space manufacturing is likely to occur until the 1990s, says John E. Naugle, a Fairchild official. For now, research will prevail. Still, the advocates of business in space believe that doubts should temper but not rule. Says 3M's Podsiadly: "The only thing more risky than participating is not participating." Says Hubert Davis, president of Houston's Eagle Engineering, a space think tank: "I believe people often overestimate what can be done in the short term, and underestimate what can be done in the long term.''

--By John S. DeMott. Reported by Lee Griggs/Chicago and David S. Jackson/Houston

With reporting by Lee Griggs, David S. Jackson