
Toray carbon fiber to carry SpaceX's Mars ambitions - netinstructions
http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Deals/Toray-carbon-fiber-to-carry-SpaceX-s-Mars-ambitions
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s_q_b
Ah, the benefits of not having to listen to shareholders. SpaceX can take long
term bets, for example moving capital into exploratory programs including the
proposed Mars missions, without having to justify it by profit.

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hyperbovine
Bezos has been doing this for decades.

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milcron
And coincidentally, is also funding spaceflight research!

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arijun
Conversation on /r/spacex:

[https://m.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/4y0z6e/toray_carbon_f...](https://m.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/4y0z6e/toray_carbon_fiber_to_carry_spacexs_mars/)

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GregBuchholz
Completely off-topic, but what's the latest thinking on space-elevators? Is
there any active research on them? I thought that carbon nanotubes or diamond
nanothreads were likely candidates for the cable material.

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oliwaw
Probably the biggest barrier to space elevators is exactly what SpaceX and
Blue Origin are doing - safe, reliable, and eventually (relatively)
inexpensive rockets will make the large fixed costs of setting up a space
elevator uneconomical.

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planteen
It seems like there is a wall in reliability with getting chemical rockets
much more reliable than about 99% - 99.5%. SpaceX and Blue Origin are doing
cool things, but I don't see them being any more reliable than previous
generations of chemical rockets.

If an elevator could provide more 9s of reliability, that could be huge.

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oliwaw
But cost is also at issue. For cargo, it might make sense to take on 0.5-1.0%
risk versus the massive investments necessary for the development of a space
elevator.

And when we're talking about human spaceflight, consider the work SpaceX and
Blue are putting into in-flight abort and propulsive landing - SpaceX's Crew
Dragon should be much safer than the Space Shuttle, for example.

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planteen
Yeah for cargo I agree. I was thinking more along the lines for human rating.

Propulsive landing helps for some failure modes but not all. Like I don't
think it would have helped the CRS-7 failure had that been manned.

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hLHEDuYtSh
It actually would have helped on CRS-7 -- That capsule was fine until it hit
the water.

[https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/07/saving-spaceship-
dra...](https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/07/saving-spaceship-dragon-
contingency-chute/)

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oliwaw
Between the recent news of SpaceX shipping a test article of its Mars rocket
to McGregor (the Raptor engine) and this large contract for material for its
Mars Colonial Transporter, SpaceX's Mars plans are shaping nicely.

Hopefully Congress takes notice within the next few years, and funnels the
money currently spent on the SLS rocket to Musk's Mars project.

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Animats
In some ways, not a good sign. Space-X can't make and launch Falcon boosters
fast enough now. They're not a big enough company to do many things in
parallel. Their unfinished, and late, projects include the Falcon Heavy, the
Brownsville TX launch facility, and the crewed Dragon, all of which were
supposed to be working by now.

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arijun
As a point on the FH, one reason it's delayed is that it has lower priority:
now that the Falcon 9 has been upgraded to the full thrust version, it can
take many customers who were originally envisioned to go on the Heavy

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robryan
I think that they only have one customer lined up which actually needs the
heavy? And hopefully being able to do the red dragon mission in 2018.

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fastball
My only issue with carbon fiber is that it is not very easily recycled.
Aluminum, on the other hand, is quite trivially recycled. So while spaceships
made from CFRP are great in the short-to-medium term (a single spaceship can
get a lot more use), I hope that we figured out how to recycle CFRP sooner
rather than later.

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colechristensen
Aerospace aluminum isn't as easily recycled as beer cans.

If you're building a space ship you have very tight tolerances and specifics
needed for the alloying of the metals you use. The aluminum in aircraft is
full of strange things that need to be removed for general use aluminum and
definitely need to be removed for building new aircraft.

You're right that melting and re-casting aluminum is really cheap and
efficient for beer cans, it's not so much the same for aerospace aluminum.

When it comes down to spaceships, the energy used to produce them is usually a
very small portion of the total cost of the mission and we don't make very
many of them – recycling isn't and shouldn't be a priority.

The Falcon 9 burns 110,000 liters of kerosene every launch, if it were made of
carbon fiber, maybe it wouldn't matter how the structure was disposed.

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matthewrhoden1
I never thought about it but I became curious as to what the differences are,
here's what I was able to find:

[0] Aircraft grade aluminum alloy's composition roughly includes 5.6–6.1%
zinc, 2.1–2.5% magnesium, 1.2–1.6% copper, and less than a half percent of
silicon, iron, manganese, titanium, chromium, and other metals.

[1] Aluminum cans are typically 1% magnesium, 1% manganese, 0.4% iron, 0.2%
silicon, and 0.15% copper.

There are a lot of metrics that determine the appropriate use of various
grades of aircraft level alloys [2]. I guess from the outside some big
considerations are how the metal reacts to temperature change and how well a
metal cylinder can handle stress while staying light.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7075_aluminium_alloy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7075_aluminium_alloy)
[1] [http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Aluminum-Beverage-
Can.html](http://www.madehow.com/Volume-2/Aluminum-Beverage-Can.html) [2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_alloy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_alloy)

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colechristensen
>how well a metal cylinder can handle stress while staying light.

Are we talking beer cans or rockets? Maybe they are the same after all :)

All spot on. There are lots of alloys used for lots of different things and
economics and availability play their part too. When you're designing your
airplane every slight detail matters.

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fhrjchcjdnc
Carbon fiber is a pretty weird choice for a reusable rocket. Unlike aluminum,
it has basically zero tolerance to heat since the fibers are embedded in a
matrix made of a polymer glue compound. That's why they call it fiber
reinforced plastic.

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jccooper
SpaceX already uses carbon fiber on their rockets in the interstage and
payload shroud. They do provide some insulation: they're covered in cork. But
most of the rocket body encounters extra low temperatures more than high
temperatures.

