As chemists, we instinctively manipulate variables – concentration, temperature, current – seeking the right conditions to achieve a desired outcome or retracing our steps to understand why certain inputs yield specific results. For all the billions of chemical experiments performed in human history, gravity has been largely treated as a physical constant. But with rapidly growing access to space, we now have the ability to treat gravity, one of the four fundamental forces of nature, as an experimental variable. Without gravity, we have the opportunity to study how chemical reactions behave without the influence of acceleration-dependent convection, hydrostatic pressure, flotation, sedimentation, or container interactions.

But as with any new field of study, the right tools are needed to understand and exercise its potential.

The idea of experimentation in microgravity is not new – the first US space station, Skylab (1973), hosted a series of chemistry experiments, some as fundamental as “Metals Melting (M551)“. Many of these findings highlight the incredible potential microgravity environments offer for scientific discovery. However, these experiments, and those taking place on the International Space Station today, are often performed in uncreative experimental setups and with equipment that was originally designed to operate on Earth.

This talk will outline previous investigations in microgravity, note their findings and critique their experimental design, and present Astral Materials’ approach to inventing the right tools for Microgravity Chemistry to reach its full potential.