REV1 is a fully automated vehicle, in which companies will be able to manufacture new products. Its first flight is scheduled for the end of 2025.
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In the space field, the French are not lacking in ideas or initiatives. After the Zéphyr microfuse (latitude), the minivan carrying small satellites (exotrail), the reusable spaceship conveying freight (The Exploration Company) and solar sailing (GAMA), place in Rev1, the first factory of the ‘space.
This project was presented, Thursday, October 27 in Luxembourg, by the start-up Space Cargo Unlimited (SCU), during the Newspace Europe conference. It is a fully automated vehicle, in which companies will be able to manufacture new products. Putting orbit 350 or 450 kilometers from the earth, the 4.5 -meter -wide capsule designed by Thales Alenia Space will remain several months in space, before returning. The first flight is scheduled for the end of 2025.
“In the absence of terrestrial gravity, you will have more homogeneous materials”, explains the CEO and co -founder of SCU, Nicolas Gaume, taking the example of alloys where, currently, the heaviest metal goes downwards And the lightest upwards. Same imperative of homogeneity for fiber optics based on fluorine, “a hundred times more conductive than conventional fiber, but very hard to manufacture on earth”.
several interested sectors
This weightless environment should interest the pharmacy for the development of stem cells or cosmetics due to “better crystallization”. However, it was in agriculture that the first tests took place, within the framework of the Wise project, carried out with the National Center for Spatial Studies and the Institute of Sciences of Vine and Wine in Bordeaux, and destined to find more resistant grape varieties in the face of global warming.
Three hundred and twenty vines – half Cabernet, half Merlot – stayed in the international space station for ten months, locked up in a dark box maintained at a temperature of 2 ° C at 3 ° C. “The gravity being the spine of life on earth, his absence put them in a state of absolute stress, explains the Bordeaux entrepreneur. This allowed us to measure their reaction and their adaptation” compared to the same box remain on Earth. The idea is to see then how these plants behave once replanted.
Before this floating factory project in low orbit, Nicolas Gaume became known in video games. In 1990, at the age of 19, he launched Kalisto, who went bankrupt twelve years later. Since then, he has developed various companies on the web, before being passionate about space in 2014. “It is my eighth start-up”, specifies this fifties, convinced that the manufacturing in orbit prefigures the next industrial revolution.