SpaceX Is Making Products in Space and Dropping Them Into the Ocean for Pickup

SpaceX is working on something pretty wild. The company is quietly building a business around manufacturing products in space and shipping them back to Earth.

The program is called Starfall. The idea is to take advantage of microgravity, the condition of near-weightlessness in orbit, to make things that are hard or impossible to produce on the ground. On Earth, gravity causes molecules to settle unevenly, which messes with how crystals and biological materials form. In space that doesn’t happen, so the same materials come out more uniform and purer.

Here’s how it works. Small disc-shaped reentry capsules, think a hockey puck scaled up to about three metres wide, get loaded with materials and launched into orbit aboard Starship. Once in space the capsules float freely while the materials process in microgravity. When enough time has passed, the capsules fire their thrusters, reenter the atmosphere and splash down in the Pacific Ocean for recovery. Starship can carry a bunch of them per flight, stacked like a Pez dispenser.

The target products are pretty varied. Pharmaceuticals like higher quality protein crystals for drug development, semiconductors, advanced optical fibers and potentially food and beauty products. There are also reported military applications including rapid cargo delivery to anywhere on the planet.

The FAA just wrapped up an environmental assessment for initial test missions, clearing the way for up to 10 reentries a year once full licensing comes through. SpaceX has already trademarked the Starfall name and is reportedly in talks with potential customers. Full service is targeted for the end of the decade, though everything still depends on Starship’s continued development.

This sounds so cool, and would have been even cooler if it was named Skyfall.