You’ve probably seen those grainy videos of astronauts eating floating M&Ms or trying to sleep in vertical sleeping bags. It’s cool, sure. But there is something way more interesting happening on the International Space Station (ISS) that has nothing to do with snacks. Scientists are literally spinning out of this world strands of material that simply cannot exist on Earth.
Gravity is a jerk. Honestly, it ruins almost everything we try to build at a microscopic level. On Earth, gravity causes "convection"—basically, hot fluids rise and cold fluids sink. This creates swirls and bubbles that mess up the internal structure of fibers, cables, and biological tissues. In the microgravity of orbit, that problem just disappears. What we’re left with are materials so pure and so strong they make our best terrestrial tech look like something from the Stone Age.
The ZBLAN Revolution and Why Your Internet is Slow
Let’s talk about ZBLAN. It sounds like a planet from a bad sci-fi movie, but it’s actually a type of heavy metal fluoride glass. For decades, engineers have known that ZBLAN should, theoretically, be about a hundred times better at carrying data than the silica fiber optics we use today. If we replaced our current cables with perfect ZBLAN, you could transmit data across the Atlantic without needing a single signal repeater.
The catch? When you try to make ZBLAN on Earth, gravity causes tiny crystals to form inside the glass. These crystals act like little speed bumps, scattering light and making the cable useless.
Companies like FOMS (Fiber Optic Manufacturing in Space) and Mercury Scientific have been sending small "factories"—basically the size of a microwave—up to the ISS to see if they can fix this. In microgravity, the crystals don't form. You get out of this world strands of glass that are almost perfectly clear. We aren't just talking about faster Netflix downloads here. We are talking about the backbone of a global quantum internet.
The manufacturing process is fascinatingly weird. Because there’s no "down," you don't need a massive pulling tower like you do in a factory in North Carolina or China. You just melt the glass and pull it. It stays straight. It stays pure.
Why the Price Tag is Shrinking
Historically, making anything in space was a joke. It cost $10,000 just to get a can of soda into orbit. But SpaceX changed the math. With the Falcon 9 and now Starship, the cost per kilogram is plummeting.
This makes "in-space manufacturing" (ISM) a legitimate business model rather than a government hobby. If a spool of space-made fiber is worth $1 million because of its performance, and it only costs $50,000 to launch the raw materials, the profit margin is massive. It’s the first time in history where the most valuable thing we can bring back from space isn't moon rocks, but high-end industrial products.
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Biological Strands: Printing Organs in the Void
Materials science is one thing, but biology is where this gets kind of creepy and amazing at the same time. Think about human protein strands and collagen.
If you try to 3D print a human heart or a piece of liver tissue on Earth, it collapses. It’s like trying to build a skyscraper out of wet Jell-O. You need "scaffolding"—artificial supports that the cells can cling to. But these scaffolds often cause issues when you try to transplant the tissue into a human body.
In orbit, you don't need scaffolds.
NASA’s Biological Experiment Laboratory and private firms like Techshot (now part of Redwire) have been using the BioFabrication Facility (BFF) on the ISS to print out of this world strands of cardiac tissue. Without gravity pulling the cells down, they just... stay where you put them. They grow in three dimensions naturally.
- Cells are placed in a bio-ink.
- The printer lays down precise layers.
- The tissue "matures" in a bioreactor for several weeks.
- The result is a thick, functional tissue sample that looks and acts like the real thing.
We aren't at the point of printing full hearts yet. Don't believe anyone who tells you that’s happening next week. We are, however, successfully printing meniscus tissues for knees and small patches of heart muscle. These biological strands are far more organized than anything grown in a petri dish in a lab in Boston or San Diego.
Carbon Nanotubes and the Space Elevator Dream
If you’ve ever fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, you’ve heard of the Space Elevator. A cable stretching from Earth to a geostationary satellite. It’s the holy grail of space travel. To build it, you need a material with incredible tensile strength. Carbon nanotubes are the primary candidate.
On Earth, we can grow carbon nanotubes, but they’re usually short and messy. They’re like a tangled ball of yarn. To make a cable, you need long, continuous, perfectly aligned out of this world strands of carbon.
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Recent experiments suggest that chemical vapor deposition—the process used to grow these nanotubes—behaves differently in microgravity. Without the thermal convection currents that wiggle the nanotubes as they grow, we might finally be able to grow them long enough to actually use in high-strength applications.
We might not get a space elevator by 2030. But we might get ultra-lightweight power cables or aircraft wings that are ten times stronger than titanium and a fraction of the weight. That’s the real-world application people often overlook while waiting for the "big" sci-fi stuff.
The Problem of Scale
Let’s be real for a second. There is a huge gap between making a 100-meter strand of fiber in a small box on the ISS and mass-producing it for the planet.
Right now, we are in the "Cottage Industry" phase of space manufacturing. It's slow. It's experimental.
The biggest bottleneck isn't the science; it's the "return." We are getting very good at launching things. We are still kind of mediocre at bringing things back down safely and cheaply. Using a SpaceX Dragon capsule to bring back a few spools of fiber is like using a semi-truck to deliver a single wedding ring. It works, but it’s not efficient.
Varda Space Industries is trying to solve this. They recently successfully landed a return capsule in the Utah desert that was designed specifically for pharmaceutical processing in space. They grew crystals for the drug Ritonavir (used to treat HIV). The crystals grown in space were more uniform and stable than those grown on Earth. This is a big deal for shelf-life and how the body absorbs the medicine.
What Most People Get Wrong About Space Materials
A lot of folks think we’re going to space to find new elements. Like we’re looking for "Unobtainium" from Avatar.
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That's not it at all.
We have all the elements we need right here. The reason we’re looking for out of this world strands is that gravity is a fundamental "contaminant" in the manufacturing process.
Think of it like trying to paint a masterpiece while someone is constantly shaking your arm. You can be the best painter in the world, but the lines will never be perfect. Going to space is just like finally getting that person to stop shaking your arm.
Specific Examples of What's Coming:
- Ultra-Strong Polymers: Using microgravity to align polymer chains in ways that make plastic as strong as steel.
- Superior Metal Alloys: Creating "immiscible" alloys—metals that don't like to mix on Earth (like oil and water) because one is heavier than the other. In space, they mix perfectly.
- High-Efficiency Semiconductors: Growing larger, more perfect silicon wafers for the next generation of AI chips.
The Actionable Reality
If you're an investor, an engineer, or just someone who likes tech, stop looking at "space" as a place to visit and start looking at it as a place to work.
The shift from "Space Exploration" to "Space Industrialization" is happening right now. The companies that figure out how to reliably produce and return these out of this world strands are going to be the IBMs and Intels of the next fifty years.
What you can do now:
- Follow the launch schedules: Watch companies like Varda and Redwire. They are the ones actually doing the manufacturing, not just launching satellites.
- Monitor ISS Research: The NASA GeneLab and the ISS National Lab publish open-source data on these experiments. If you're a data nerd, the results are all there.
- Invest in the supply chain: The real winners in the "space strand" gold rush won't just be the manufacturers, but the companies building the autonomous return capsules and the "space tugs" that move materials between orbits.
The future isn't just about going to Mars. It's about making things in the vacuum that make life on Earth fundamentally better. We’re finally learning how to weave the fabric of the future, and we had to leave the planet to find the right thread.