It has been said that space is the final frontier, but for some businesses, space is the new marketplace.

Businesses are leveraging the microgravity environment of space for research, product development, and innovation, as the weightlessness of space loosens the bonds of gravity, enabling processes and experiments that are not possible on the terra firma of Earth. The environment has proven useful for materials science enterprises interested in pursuing purer alloys, glasses, and ceramics.

Investigating manufacturing processes in space is not new: Experiments have been conducted on the International Space Station (ISS) for more than two decades, and they took place on the space shuttle before that. But the potential for commercial use of space for microgravity processing has grown in recent years.