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FiftyTwo comments on Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014 - Less Wrong
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Working on a near future hard sci fi story. What are plausible economic reasons to have a fair number of space stations? (generally earth orbit but can be further out)
Highly valuable technological processes that only work in zero g.
Such as?
You're writing fiction, make it up :-) Off the top of my head, metals and alloys crystallize differently in microgravity. It's also easy to make perfect spheres. I'm sure that googling microgravity technology will give you further leads.
From what I've seen the ISS is doing very interesting work on plasma physics in space due to having free high-vacuum available and the ability to inject highly-visible tracer particles into a plasma chamber which don't settle out, this also allowing interesting mixed particulate/plasma states.
http://www.nasa.gov/content/space-station-illuminates-dusty-plasmas-for-a-wide-range-of-research/stationresearch/#.VFo2yoWxt2M
As far as application for crystallization goes, protein scanning needs the proteins in crystallized form. If someone would have a way to crystalize arbitrary proteins in zero-g that would be very valuable.
I've heard you can make LEDs slightly brighter. I don't think that would cause it, but it does give some idea that this is plausible.
It would be fun to have corporations build space stations, ostensibly for technological benefits, but not disclosing details, so that your question would remain unanswered inside the story.