A floating water ball on ISS is the future

Have you seen the video at the International Space Station where astronaut Scott Kelly is messing around with an Alka-Seltzer tablet dissolved in a floating ball of water?

Daniel Faber, CEO of asteroid mining startup Deep Space Industries said that the video is the future.

The video shot in crystal-clear 4K resolution, you can see roughly tennis ball-sized blob of water floating around as Kelly changes its color by injecting a few drops of dye. He also slips an effervescent tablet into the ball and we can watch it bubble and fizz inside the mass of water. Gas bubbles form inside and occasionally escape the surface tension of the water, deforming it a bit in the process.

Faber told an audience that included this reporter at the New Worlds Conference in Austin last weekend that the video re-affirmed the untapped value of space for him.

"This is an industrial process waiting to be developed," he said.

Faber envisions potential manufacturing or other industrial processes that may be able to take advantage of the odd properties of liquids in microgravity to keep substances separated from each other in a more controlled manner. He said, maybe there is "a way to use what we're seeing in that video to keep toxic substances in a liquid separate from other substances."

Faber used silicon carbide wafers as an example, which are used in the production of semiconductors. He cited research that shows silicon carbide created in microgravity has fewer imperfections and works better than when the same substance is created in labs on Earth.

The potential effects of microgravity on science and industry is of particular interest to Faber's company, Deep Space Industries, which hopes to start mining asteroids to supply raw materials for a new space economy that may include things like orbiting solar power stations and new communications infrastructure, just for starters.

With just a small tablet of Alka-Seltzer tablet, who know what else could be discovered.