Mueller talks about “ pharmaceuticals, or materials, or semiconductors” production shifting to space. Can anyone expand on this please? What aspects of these industries is better done in space? How large (in revenue) are those portions of those industries? Thanks!
Building organs in microgravity, a potentially crucial ingredient to make the process work. From what I've seen this is the most realistic near future application.
"When you're 3D-printing a tissue culture on the ground, there's a tendency for them to collapse in the presence of gravity," he says. "The tissues require some sort of [temporary, organic] scaffold to hold everything in place, especially with cavities like the chambers of a heart. But you don't have those effects in a micro-gravity environment, which is why these experiments have been so valuable."[0]
Although I do think, taking human progression in the limit, moving to self sustaining manufacturing in space, using local raw materials (asteroids or otherwise), and dropping products back down to earth will be the natural progression. Space offers what earth does not -- infinite resources, infinite space(heh), infinite energy. Delete scarcity and what remains is purely a logistics problem.
