Oliver Evans' Flour Mill and Tomorrow's Orbital Factory Floor

摘要

It is useful to look back on the dawn of the First Industrial Revolution and one of the often-quoted examples of the first factories in order to gain insight into our factory floor of the future, low earth orbit. By discussing why Oliver Evans' Flour Mill was considered one of the first examples of the modern factory and discussing how it operated, the essence of the factory floor can be reviewed and then applied to commercial space. This paper is based on my talk given to the LA-LV AIAA Section New Space Mini-Conference on 6 March 2019 in Hawthorne, California which, in turn, was based on my SciTech 2019 paper, "Mega Trends in Systems, Systems Engineering, and Sustainment" which discussed a much broader sweep of history.