SAN FRANCISCO – Silicon Valley startup Flawless Photonics has produced more than 5 kilometers of ZBLAN on the International Space Station in two weeks.
It’s an achievement that alluded other companies that tried to produce the fluoride glass in microgravity.
For in-space manufacturing, Flawless Photonics’ accomplishment “is in a class by itself,” Lynn Harper, strategy lead for NASA ISS InSpace Production Applications, told SpaceNews. “They have produced commercial lots. They’ve done it repeatedly.”
Killer App
ZBLAN, an optical fiber prized for its transparency and widely used terrestrially in lasers and amplifiers, has long been considered a potential killer app for in-space manufacturing. If companies could produce fibers in microgravity with fewer imperfections than fibers produced on the ground, the thinking went, they could bring them to Earth and sell them at prices high enough to make the whole endeavor profitable.
Flawless Photonics’ “unprecedented results” are likely to prompt investigations into new types of glass that could be “very important for our defense industry and our national security,” said Rose Hernandez, director of InSpace Production Applications for the ISS National Lab. “Now they can tap into technologies that were not possible on Earth.”
Energy Savings
ZBLAN offers the promise of energy savings.
“The moon shot here is making undersea cables with ZBLAN,” said Michael Vestel, Flawless Photonics chief technology officer and vice president.
ZBLAN is far more transparent than silica, the fiber-optic glass in undersea communications cables. Improved transparency translates to less signal attenuation.
So, instead of having inline optical repeaters to boost the signal in submarine communications cables “every 40 or 50 kilometers, you could have them at distances of 10 or 100 times that,” said Vestel, who earned a PhD in materials science and engineering from the…
Read the full article here