First space products to be marketed

Press, 23 January 1984, Page 20

First space products to be marketed

NZPA-AP Washington Plastic beads so tiny that millions fit in bottles smaller than your little finger will be marketed next year as the first commercial product entitled to the label: made in space. Nowhere else could they have been made uniform and perfectly round. They were created in four flights of the space shuttle, and the only thing that remains before they can be put to use is that they be measured and their size guaranteed. In the hands of medical researchers, the beads will be put to such exotic uses as measuring the exit channels of the eyes of glaucoma victims and determining the size of the pores of stomach and intestinal walls in cancer studies. They will be used to calibrate industrial and electronic instruments and devices that measure pollution. With ceremony appropriate to the occasion, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration soon will turn over 25 grams of beads — less than one ounce — to the national bureau of standards. The bureau will certify their 10 micrometer size within one hundredmillionth of a metre, said Stan Raspberry, chief of the office of standard reference materials. A micrometer equals onemillionth of a metre. When that project is completed in 1985, the beads will be divided into 600 units and sold to private

researchers. While technology developed for space has found applications on Earth, the latex beads created in the shuttles monodisperse latex reactor are the first true space products to find commercial uses. There are many more such products to follow, however, including drugs made with a purity obtainable only in space. On Earth, it is possible only to make latex beads of up to three micrometers because gravity tends to make larger sizes eggshaped and irregular. The beads created in the microgravity in which the shuttle flies can be made in uniform, perfectly round sizes in large quantities. Mr Raspberry said that eventually the Bureau of Standards expects to certify space-produced spheres of 30 and 100 micrometers.