Space: Business Heads for Zero Gravity

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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.