Word: 3m
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
Alongside 3M in business ventures in orbit is McDonnell Douglas, the St. Louis aerospace company. The firm has long made propulsion systems and other hardware for the U.S. space program and the shuttle. On five nights earlier this year, McDonnell Douglas and Johnson & Johnson, the New Jersey medical-supply company, ran electrophoresis experiments, which allowed precise separation under weightless conditions of biological materials. Although one batch was contaminated, the others permitted the removal of impurities too small to be extracted on earth. One possible outgrowth: production of insulin-producing cells to control diabetes. Says Isaac Gillam, the NASA official...
...extensive space manufacturing is likely to occur until the 1990s, says John E. Naugle, a Fairchild official. For now, research will prevail. Still, the advocates of business in space believe that doubts should temper but not rule. Says 3M's Podsiadly: "The only thing more risky than participating is not participating." Says Hubert Davis, president of Houston's Eagle Engineering, a space think tank: "I believe people often overestimate what can be done in the short term, and underestimate what can be done in the long term...