Description: The sustainable orbital manufacturing with commercially viable and profitable operation has tremendous potential for driving the space exploration industry and human expansion into outer space. This highly challenging task has never been accomplished before. The current relatively high delivery cost of materials represents the business challenge of value proposition for making products on orbit. FOMS Inc. team identified an opportunity of revolutionary optical fiber manufacturing in space that can lead to the first commercial production on orbit. To address NASA mission of expansion humanity across solar system while providing continued cost-effective ISS operations FOMS Inc. proposes to develop Space Facility for Orbital Remote Manufacturing (SpaceFORM) with strong commercial potential for manufacturing operations on board the ISS.

Benefits: The key value of the volume manufacturing capability on the orbital platform of ISS through the proposed effort is the unique opportunity to kick start the commercially driven expansion of the humanity in space through the profit based utilization of the abundant resource of microgravity for material processing. The developed logistics, infrastructure, and operational experience of remote orbital manufacturing will be critically important for sustainable orbital presence and further expansion of in-space science and technology. The approach will leverage existing ISS facilities to extend NASA leadership in facilitating commercial space exploration.

The promise to decrease the insertion loss by an order of magnitude compared to currently installed optical fibers will have revolutionary impact on internet expansion, optical communications and data storage. The defense and security industry will benefit from improved detection of harmful substances and airplane protection from proliferating heat seeking missiles. The new applications that utilize the "fingerprint" spectral range would allow to specifically target the desired chemical compositions in both surveillance and chemical processing.