Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Solaris - A manufacturing plant in orbit

In 1981, CNES, the french space agency, envisionned an "automatic" space station dubbed SOLARIS.

The basic idea was to have a manufacturing plant in orbit to produce advanced material and pharmaceutical products in microgravity that can be brought down through unmanned capsules.
I guess the project was scrubbed when the orbital produced materials turned out to be not so promising after some experiments done in SpaceLab from 1983.





No comments:

Post a Comment