The Orbital Industrial Revolution: The Business Reasons for Industrializing Space Pt 1

This is the first post in a series, detailing how specific industries can get enormous dividends by shifting certain operations into space. Each post will focus on a single industry. This post focuses on the semiconductor industry.

The semiconductor industry has its origins in the beginning of the space race during the nineteen fifties. Their original customer was the aerospace industry, as they entered space, needed lighter computers to calculate complex trajectories and orbits. As the space race began to wind down, semiconductors began to permeate everyday life. As the personal computer and internet spread, chips began to get exponentially smaller. This leads to now, where semiconductor companies are require near perfect vacuums to fabricate the progressively smaller chips properly. To do all this on Earth, where dust can penetrate the most perfect vacuums, is expensive and tedious, requiring complex arrays of mechanical pumps and isolated assembly lines. The cost of setting up a microchip fabrication plant now nearly totals $5 billion. To offset this massive cost, the fabrication plant needs to be able produce good chips quickly. Unfortunately, most plants have terrible yields, and only approach optimum yields near the end of their useful lives. As innovation times decrease, this forces companies into a downward spiral of squeezed profits.

Space offers a way out. The base environment in space is a million times cleaner than that of the best clean room on Earth. And, the best part is that it is available for free, without having to manipulate the surrounding environment. All the processes needed to fabricate chips in space are already used on Earth. Setting up an equivalent plant in space, including launch costs, is 50% less than on Earth. Add to that, because of the ambient clean environment, space plants have 33% higher yields than the highest yields possible in terrestrial plants. This adds up to lower costs and higher profits, allowing companies to produce successive generations of chips for no more cost than the previous generation.