Toray carbon fiber to carry SpaceX's Mars ambitions

Bezos has been doing this for decades.

Materials science isn't there yet, and the investigation is still in the more general material research phase.

We're decades off. You're asking about the state of supersonic air travel while researchers are still figuring out how to smelt aluminum.

Still a lot of active research going on. The biggest issues that need to be resolved are currently with the cable material. There has been a surprising amount of progress in the last few years with creating longer carbon fibers, but its still nascent and has a minimum of 5-10 years of work. Probably much more.

Then even when the cable strength and length issues are satisfactorily resolved, there are lots of other logistics to deal with.

I think any future barriers to the elevator(s) will be more regulatory than technological in the future.

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.

The issues are huge and probably insurmountable. For example: where would you site it? It has to be equatorial so it can be below the geostationary counterweight. Just the motion of the cable from the eccentricity in the earth's rotation and orbit would probably tear the cable apart (imagine what the foundation of the base station would have to be, and how it would buckle and lift as the earth rotates).

The space elevator is an idea that sounds cool but is fucking dumb if you think about it for more than ten minutes, like the idea of accelerating ships to near light speed, when every hydrogen atom in the void will shred your hull like a cosmic ray.

They make no sense when compared with alternate method like launch loops, which can be built with current tech

>Space-X can't make and launch Falcon boosters fast enough now.

The bottleneck is not Falcon 9 production, at this point it's largely on the payload side. A faster turnaround would certainly help, but there's only so much optimization that can be done.

The Falcon Heavy is not a priority because (1) much less demand from customers and (2) it's a transitional system between Falcon 9 and built-for-reuse BFR/MCT, so it will have limited use.

Brownsville isn't a case of them being distracted but just underestimating the degree of soil surcharging needed. Crewed dragon is unfinished but hasn't missed any of NASA's deadlines so far.

I do wish that Falcon Heavy would finally launch though.

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

What are the back of envelope energy calculations? The fuel for 1 trip is a lot of energy, what's the energy required for the ship?

"Dilution is the solution" was an unfortunate attitude on Earth. It will work for millions of years in space, and hydrocarbons are pretty abundant.

Maybe, we need to think about recycling carbon fiber as..

In recycling the fibers get shorter..

Could not that be re-applied to a different industry as far as re-using the carbon fiber? Body Armour for soldiers as the shorter fibers would be of use there?

Why would you be worried about recycling spacecraft at this point in history? Up until the last 2 years, practically all spacecraft either burned up in the atmosphere, crashed into the ocean or land, landed permanently on another body, or are now sitting in a museum somewhere if they were designed to return. Recycling the material in spacecraft is simply a non-issue.

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.

It won't be used for the rocket but for the Mars transport spaceship.

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.