A clean room is a controlled environment that is used for manufacturing sensitive products like semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and solar cells. The amount of particles in the air per cubic foot must be maintained below 0.5, which calls for some serious engineering and technology to keep the area sterilized.
The air itself must be filtered to remove any contaminants before being circulated through the room, while workers entering and exiting go through rubber suits with special booties and masks with filters attached. Inside the room, all light sources must be filtered with special UV-blockers to prevent stray photons from being absorbed by materials.
The cleaning techniques used in clean rooms are constantly evolving to ensure that the environment is kept as pure as possible. Recently, scientists have been known to use light-scattering nanoparticles (which can be found in some commercial cleaners) in their research and development programs.
The desire for clean rooms has not been restricted to industrial companies publishing papers on materials synthesis and processing, but also military technology. The military sector has a need for clean room environments to prevent contamination while putting together sensitive and top secret technology like aircraft, missiles, and satellites. Some clean rooms in this sector have even been known to produce a pressure inside that is less than 1% of the external air pressure, creating a vacuum effect to keep impurities like dust from penetrating.
Clean rooms might be used for over-the-counter manufacturing purposes with cheap products, but it would be difficult for those involved in the process to manufacture such products everyday. Imagine the pressure to make sure that a product is made in a sterile environment, plus the cost associated with cleaning all of the time in order to ensure that there are no contaminants. The need for clean rooms, especially in the industrial sector, is not limited to just high tech equipment.
However, some people are opposed to having clean rooms with excessive levels of cleanliness. For instance, some have pointed out that the proportion of chemicals and solvents used in maintaining a sterile environment could affect people’s health.
As such, most organizations tend to install clean room tents. A tent is a temporary or semi-permanent structure that is erected for the sole purpose of manufacturing products in a controlled environment. Examples of clean room tents are found all around the world; from the United States, to Japan, to even Kuwait.
Typically, a clean tent consists of metal frames, plastic films and canvas walls. The clean tent is constructed just like a shipping container, with panels and layers of protection. These tents are typically attached to the ground with metal rods to complete the structure.
Musk said that he was hoping to be able to start construction of a new building in two months and then ride a rocket out of the Earth’s atmosphere before SpaceX ceased operations in December 2016. In addition, SpaceX announced in 2015 that they are working on substantially bigger rockets that would be able to ferry up to 100 humans at one time into orbit around the Moon and Mars.