This is incredible, the huge temperature shifts often create either metal damage or explosions because of instant stretching.
UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
81–90 of 93 posts
Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#82I'm curious what the thermal management system on this looks like. On one hand, vacuum being in essence a perfect insulator works in favor of keeping the silicon hot for the very long time it takes to pull a boule while requiring very little energy. On the other hand, you have to make sure the control electronics don't also heat up to 1000C. I'm also curious how you keep the molten silion separate from the crystal wi…
Vacuum is only a nearly perfect insulator until a few hundred °C. After that, radiation dominates over every other form of heat exchange, and it stops making any difference. A couple of meters long steel rod with a dissipator on the end can easily keep electronics at Earth surface temperatures even if you heat the other end to 1000°C.
The air on earth is taking the heat from the dissipators more than blackbody radiation.
Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#83Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> just as good/bad as they sound. I.e. extremely good and not at all bad.
healthwise i guess for the bad
Triple-cooked chips are usually parboiled and twice fried; if anything it's probably healthier than a single fry, because the first fry is brief and hot to crisp up the exterior, so the oil absorption's less the second time, and perhaps less overall than a single (necessarily cooler) fry.
Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#85UK - the only country to achieve to-orbit capability only to shelve it after the first flight.
France essentially did that too, in favour of the ESA (I think the French launcher may have had a couple launches, but certainly no more than ten).
France has its own agency, the CNES (though most research go through ESA nowaday), and had it for a long time.
Its launchers are still the best when it comes to reliability I believe, though not competitive on cost anymore since the advent of spaceX (Ariane6's first flight was in 2024 and its price per kilogram is just an order of magnitude worse than spaceX). Definitely missed a step.
Still, France has an active and ongoing space program since about 1970.
Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#86I'm only YouTube-level informed on how silicon manufacturing works, but something that is, perhaps intentionally, not made clear to someone unfamiliar with the field is that this is not manufacturing chips in space. This is to grow the crystals only, the very first step in silicon chip manufacturing. This is how you get the ingot, then you slice it to get the wafers upon which the chips are built. The reason you woul…
In a way that's good because they don't need logistics for the entire supply and production chain up there, they can just drop the (small and presumably valuable) silicon crystals back to Earth.
Silicon ingots used in chip manufacturing aren’t that small: like a ~400mm diameter cylinder a metre or so long, and from memory several hundred kilos.
Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chips are definitely a thing in the UK. Like French fries but usually chunkier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_and_chips
Which is called Fish and Chips in Canada, even though it's served with fries.
In the UK a fish and chips shop is sometimes called a "chip shop". The New York Times helpfully translated this in a recent article:
> “I’ve seen lots of students my age struggling, trying to get work and even the basic necessities,” Agastya Dhar, 17, said. Mr. Dhar has a part-time job in a French fry restaurant, but said even getting that job was tough.
French fry restaurant is now my preferred term for the local chippy. For those outside the UK chip shops normally have no seating, or maybe a couple of uncomfortable, uninviting, flourescent lit plastic benches and tables, normally bolted down, maybe sprayed clean at the end of the night.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/world/europe/uk-budget-yo...
Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a way that's good because they don't need logistics for the entire supply and production chain up there, they can just drop the (small and presumably valuable) silicon crystals back to Earth.
Silicon ingots used in chip manufacturing aren’t that small: like a ~400mm diameter cylinder a metre or so long, and from memory several hundred kilos.
Looking up their website, it sounds like the company are making only the seed crystal in space, not the entire silicon boule:
"Space Forge is using space-derived crystal seeds to grow ultra-high quality semiconductor substrates on Earth."
Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the Netherlands we have two words for fries and you know if someone is from the north or the south based on their use: Patat, north en Friet, south, particularly in the South people are sensitive to using the wrong, northern word. (And chips are just crisps here.)
What? Every time I see kids on the train they’re talking about going to the appie to buy a redbull and “zakje chips”. I live in Eindhoven though so idk if that plays a roll.
"Zakje chips" is a small bag of crisps (like Lays)... If they go for fries they'd say they go for a "frietje". Eindhoven is distinctly in the South :)
That damn Red Bull though, somehow the kids love it, part of it is probably that their parents keep them away from it. Sugar and Caffeine. Diabetes and poor sleep, great stuff.
Re: UK company sends factory with 1,000C furnace into space
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
France essentially did that too, in favour of the ESA (I think the French launcher may have had a couple launches, but certainly no more than ten).
France has its own agency, the CNES (though most research go through ESA nowaday), and had it for a long time. Its launchers are still the best when it comes to reliability I believe, though not competitive on cost anymore since the advent of spaceX (Ariane6's first flight was in 2024 and its price per kilogram is just an order of magnitude worse than spaceX). Definitely missed a step. Still, France has an active and…
The Ariane family is, at least formally, ESA, not CNES, tho. The UK also has its own agency, but launches via ESA (or private). I think it would be probably fair to say that Ariane is more French than anything else, but it’s not strictly a French project.
Confusingly, the EU also has its own agency, though it doesn’t, as far as I can see, do much outside of operating Galileo. ESA, though obviously very EU aligned, isn’t an EU agency, and has non-EU/EEA/former-EU members (notably, _Canada_).