Manufacturing in Space

I recently found this article about a company in California that announced ambitious plans to begin prospecting and mine near-Earth asteroids by 2020. Eventually these can be used to place small manufacturing facilities on the asteroids to manufacture things like space stations.

Talk about a fascinating idea. With the price of space technology going down and automation technology becoming smaller and smaller, why not! This sheds a whole new light on facility management in space and advanced manufacturing processes like 3D printing. You can read the article here.