Materials in space
In space we have some things that we do not have here on Earth, one of them is weightlessness, and thanks to this we can achieve industrial and chemical processes to reach an extraordinary degree of purity, because microgravity eliminates issues such as composition, sedimentation and buoyancy that deform and alter physical and chemical processes here on Earth.
Microgravity or weightlessness, or rather microgravity, which is the correct term, when we say weightlessness, there really is no 100% weightlessness, but in microgravity diffusion is the dominant process, diffusion is important when you have to mix elements because you achieve very smooth mixtures and allow perfect structures, you create uniform, precise and perfect structures at the level of individual molecules, even at the level of atoms, thanks to that perfection, to that weightlessness.
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And this gives rise to unique lessons and formulations, an example is the image above, at the top you have the ZBLAN in conditions of Earth's gravity and below the ZBLAN in weightlessness, at the top it is with a lot of imperfections and at the bottom practically pure, ZBLAN is an acronym for fluorozirconate, zirconium, barium, lanthanum, aluminum and sodium.
The ZBLAN produced with this degree of purity in space reaches prices of 600,000 to 3 million dollars per kilogram, that is about $1,000 per meter thanks to the degree of purity it achieves. And what is this for? They are fibers for communications and the pure ones, those made in space, reach about 2,000 times a higher level of purity than those made on Earth. And this allows, because they are already doing tests with it, it allows communications thousands of times more precise and cleaner, since the imperfections in these cases are a kind of nuisance.
It is as if the light passing through the fiber ends up tripping over them, it is as if the terrestrial ZBLAN were a mountain path and the space ZBLAN would be like traveling on a highway and this is a tremendous advance for electronic systems, communications, computers, etc. The most interesting thing is that all the elements to make these fibers, zirconium, barium, lanthanum, aluminum, sodium, fluorine, are found in the lunar regolith, which is the soil of the moon.
Everything has been discovered or has been found in different quantities in that lunar soil, the Apollo missions, for example, found Fluorine and the rest was found in other analyzes of other missions. The Chinese have also found some of these elements, there are also rare earths on the moon, by the way, in large quantities.
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But to extract all this, machinery like the one above will be needed. This is designed by Interlune and would be machinery to collect large amounts of lunar soil and process it to obtain the essential materials to manufacture, for example, these fibers or anything else that needs to be manufactured in the weightless environment.
The projection is that from the middle of the century all these elements that I told you about before will begin, the ZBLAN and others, there are a lot of them, which can only be produced in space due to these conditions of weightlessness that allow many elements to be mixed, ZBLAN is not a pure element, it is not made up of a single element, but rather a combination of elements and combining them, fusing them, uniting them, building at a molecular level, fusing several elements, leaving that purity, that degree of purity or manage to fuse at a molecular, even atomic, level, can only be achieved in conditions of weightlessness.
When all this is developed and if we want to have cheap ZBLAN and other cheap elements and when we start to build automated space stations where these elements can be manufactured in large quantities, a large amount of material will be needed, extracting material from the Earth costs much more than extracting it from the Moon, that is why it will be much more profitable to extract all those materials, all that raw material from the Moon, and it will even be more profitable in the long term to build the own spaceships, space stations, equipment, everything on the Moon and in the lunar environment.
The images without reference were created with AI
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