SpaceX announces Mars Colonisation architecture

[Planr]

carbon fiber is not a good building material

[Ad Bot]

[SeventhSandwich]

carbon fiber is not a good building material

if we're being fair though, hardened steel will also deform underneath that thing.

[Planr]

if we're being fair though, hardened steel will also deform underneath that thing.

so what would you say is the best material then for building this thing out of. asking out of curiosity cause that carbon fiber sure looked weak to me

thats a pe-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wgUuIRvA-k

[Tezuni 2.0]

one of my favorite channels "every Elon Musk video" just posted a one hour video on the full plan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFA6DLT1jBA

[Aide33]

carbon fiber is not a good building material

It's special aluminium reinforced carbon fiber woven a certain way, they have already tested most of the tanks built with it and they are to spec

pic of it:

[hillkill]

i'm a bit puzzled as to why we spend so much on trying to colonize new planets/moons. shouldn't we be focused on preserving our planet?

[SeventhSandwich]

so what would you say is the best material then for building this thing out of. asking out of curiosity cause that carbon fiber sure looked weak to me

Carbon fiber is actually a pretty good material. It has an ultimate tensile strength many multiples higher than steel, it's extremely lightweight, and not prohibitively expensive.

Under the same conditions as this experiment, reinforced steel would have broken/exploded.

i'm a bit puzzled as to why we spend so much on trying to colonize new planets/moons. shouldn't we be focused on preserving our planet?

Space science makes stuffloads of technology that later end up useful for Earth-based purposes. Especially in the field of material science.

[log]

i'm a bit puzzled as to why we spend so much on trying to colonize new planets/moons. shouldn't we be focused on preserving our planet?

colonizing new planets helps us preserve our planet

[hillkill]

colonizing new planets helps us preserve our planet

no, i meant why can't we stop loving up our planet? we wouldn't need to colonize somewhere else then.

[log]

no, i meant why can't we stop loving up our planet? we wouldn't need to colonize somewhere else then.

we can and are doing both though; cleaner energy sources and sustainable practices are being developed at the same time these new space technologies are.

[Gytyyhgfffff]

no, i meant why can't we stop loving up our planet? we wouldn't need to colonize somewhere else then.

we aren't colonizing mars because earth is forgeted, we're doing it because its cool as stuff

[Ipquarx]

carbon fiber is not a good building material

Yes because I'm sure we'll be putting the space shuttle under a hydraulic press.

Dude, there are some of the smartest engineers in the world working on this. This isn't some random joe shmoe throwing cool-sounding materials at the wall.

[hillkill]

couldn't a $5.1 billion budget (in 2014) be put to use to directly benefit other people? sure it might help them in the next 300 years or so (we're honestly never going to see a lot of progress any time in the near future), but right now there are people who are homeless, starving, or both.

[SeventhSandwich]

couldn't a $5.1 billion budget (in 2014) be put to use to directly benefit other people?

$5.1 billion is a pittance in terms of the total federal budget. More money is misappropriated to bureaucracy and failed government programs than anything NASA is capable of using.

sure it might help them in the next 300 years or so (we're honestly never going to see a lot of progress any time in the near future)

Dude you benefit on a daily basis from technologies developed by NASA less than fifty years ago. So much currently-used technology has come from NASA alone that there's a wikipedia page dedicated to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies

right now there are people who are homeless, starving, or both.

And helping them is not contingent on defunding NASA. The people who want to get rid of NASA's funding are historically not the kind of people willing to fork out money for social programs that help the homeless.

[Planr]

Yes because I'm sure we'll be putting the space shuttle under a hydraulic press.

why would we use a space shuttle to go to mars... the space shuttle program was ended x.x