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How Corning Could Profit from Space Glass

  • Erin Lear Loughan
  • Mar 31
  • 2 min read

Updated: Apr 1

Richard Smith from Montley Fool wrote about Flawless photonics... A tiny company has a great big idea for making fiber optic cable in space -- but it would take a big company to make this product a reality.

Global telecommunications is increasingly run on optical fiber -- thin, flexible strands of glass through which light signals are pulsed to transmit data for everything from voice phone calls to web surfing. And this trend is accelerating thanks to vast improvements (in bandwidth, speed of transmission, and signal integrity) over legacy copper wire.

As recently as 2015, for example, Statista data shows that only 11% of broadband connections in the United States were fiber optic. By 2022, that number had nearly doubled to 20.4%. (Don't get too excited. The U.S. is still far behind such countries as Korea, Japan, Spain, and Sweden, all of which have better than 80% fiber optic penetration.)

Notably, the biggest U.S. maker of glass used in this technology -- Corning (GLW -2.35%) -- is actually only the No. 3 manufacturer of fiber optics globally. Both Switzerland's TE Connectivity (NYSE: TEL) and Japan's Sumitomo Corporation are bigger. Clearly, America could do better -- and the good news is that it's trying.

A second requirement is a means of transporting manufactured SpaceFiber from orbit, where it's made, down to Earth, where it would be used. Parachuting occasional Soyuz and Dragon capsules down to splash in the ocean doesn't seem to me like an especially reliable way to build a supply chain for glass goods. Starships from SpaceX spring to mind, flying regular milk runs to orbit and back -- before products manufactured in orbit for use on Earth become commercially viable.

The key factor in making SpaceFiber a success would be money. As in, a lot of money, and probably a big company (on the scale of a Corning or TE Connectivity) to pay for setting up factories in orbit and hiring transportation of space glass back down to Earth. Whether as an investor in Flawless Photonics, or as a buyer of the company in its entirety, that's probably the way this would work.


 
 
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