Outpost Launches In-Space Manufacturing Service

Outpost Technologies Corporation, the reentry startup building shipping-container-sized Earth return vehicles, led by Jason Dunn, Amir Blachman, and the team, has announced a new program called Space Factories, which will offer customers a way to manufacture goods in orbit, without needing to build bespoke hardware of their own.

Each Space Factory is a standardized in-space manufacturing module designed to produce products such as pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and advanced crystals, with rapid return to Earth after production.

“No company should have to become a spacecraft company just to find out whether their product is better when it’s made in space,” Outpost President and cofounder Amir Blachman said in a statement. “We’re designing and building the hard, expensive infrastructure: the vehicle, the power and thermal systems, standardized manufacturing modules, the reentry and recovery; and we operate it as a service.”

Outpost’s First Space Factory Mission.

Outpost will be the first user of the Space Factory platform, planning to manufacture StarFiber, its next-generation metal fluoride optical fiber, on a mission targeted for 2028.

The project will use microgravity to produce optical fibers designed to achieve lower signal loss than conventional silica fibers. On Earth, gravity can introduce defects that affect fiber performance.

The demonstration aims to validate Space Factory’s ability to manufacture StarFiber in orbit, paving the way for other in-space products, including pharmaceuticals and semiconductor crystals.

Outpost VP of Commercial Partnerships Ryan Reel told Payload that he expects many of the first customers to be in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries, as those processes are “much more mature and ready to go into that automation stage and to the free flyer environment.” But in-space production of other materials isn’t too far behind.

Together, Space Factories and CarryAll are attempting to take over some of the production work happening on the ISS, and when it deorbits in the early 2030s, on CLDs, where having an astronaut present makes production harder and more expensive, Reel said.

“A lot of the material manufacturing [in space] requires high energy, and may have off-gassing or other properties that limit the ability to actually do the work on the ISS because it may harm the astronauts,” Reel said. “Any type of pilot-to-scale manufacturing—I don’t see that as occurring in the ISS or these CLDs.”

From ISS Experiments to Scalable Manufacturing.

The Space Factory platform builds on more than a decade of work by Outpost CEO Jason Dunn, who previously founded Made In Space and produced optical ZBLAN fibers on the ISS. The lengthy process of returning hardware to Earth helped drive the creation of Outpost and its focus on reliable, scalable Earth-return infrastructure.

Space Factories will operate inside Outpost’s shipping-container-sized CarryAll reentry vehicle, using separable modules for customer payloads. The modules can manage production, pressurization, thermal conditions, and data collection, with planned sizes ranging from a shoebox to the full CarryAll vehicle.

According to Outpost, the Block 2 CarryAll will provide 16 cubic meters of production capacity, increasing to 33 cubic meters with Block 3.

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