Zero-G Super Crystals - 1
The President of ISS, Drazen Premate was involved in design and development of the largest Space Furnace ever built in the world to manufacture high quality expensive electronic crystals in Zero-Gravity of Space in 1980s under the his private company called International Space Corporation (ISC).
It was called Normal Freezing Space Furnace (NFSF) and was used the so called directional solidification (Bridgman method) for cooling of the melted multi-component crystal mixture material into a crystal structure starting from a solid seed. The NFSF structure was over 8 ft long and it was to be attached onto MPESS platform inside the Space Shuttle cargo bay. It was capable of manufacturing commercial grade multi-component crystal materials of 2-3 inches in diameter in a quartz ingot in zero gravity of space and use only about 1/12th of normal power such crystal growing furnaces use on the ground.
One full ground test NFSF furnace and half of a space flight worthy one was built to eventually fly on 7 free Shuttle flights negotiated by ISS with NASA before NASA decided to take out all commercial payloads from the Space Shuttle cargo bay after the return to flight status in late 1988 from the Challenger accident. This NASA’s decision, made supposedly for safety reasons even though no cargo ever endangered the Space Shuttle or the Shuttle crew, took out thereafter all of commercial satellites from being launched from the inside of Shuttle cargo bay as well as any other Materials Processing in Space (MPS) experiments including NFSF.
Space made crystals have to be brought back to Earth to be studied and analyzed and eventually used for various electronic applications. It is not like communication satellites which are one way trip payloads, thus a return trip is needed for collected zero G materials. Zero-G processing of materials produces much higher quality crystal then when made on the ground. This specially applies to tri component materials such as Mercury Cadmium Telluride used in infrared sensing or Gallium Arsenide doped with different materials for high speed circuits.
Zero gravity produces better crystals because there is no gravity in orbit round Earth (perpetual free fall) thus no weight of the liquid above the growing crystal interface that can crack it, there is no sedimentation, no convection, no separation of materials before they solidify due to density difference. Most of these materials grow very slow like as slow as 1 mm per hour or 1 inch per day thus longer term zero-g stays are required.
Some of these crystal materials are very valuable and expensive because of their unique applications like satellite infrared sensing or high speed switching circuits and they are hard do make on the ground and have very low effective yields based on the weight of the usable crystal relative to manufactured one which can be as low as 2%-3%. Some materials cost $200,000-$300,000 per pound thus justifying the economics of high cost of production in zero gravity of space.
Until there is again in existence a usable fully orbital space plane or space shuttle like vehicle that can go in the orbit and come back to earth with processed crystal materials, ISS will not be able to develop or use large scale space crystal growing furnaces such as NFSF was. Small, more adaptable to various launch configuration and self contained furnace systems that can stay in orbit for certain amount of time will be built and launched on an expendable rocket such as Taurus or Pegasus or similar before such furnace system is the parachuted back to Earth again with zero-g processed crystals.
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