Could Future Space Craft be Made of Concrete?
A space elevator has been talked about since Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, having witnessed the building of the Effiel Tower in 1895. He proposed a tower being built to the height of 35,000 km, the hieght of geostationary orbit. However, from that time to this, there has not been a material strong enough to build a space elevator. In the 21st Century, nano technology has made it theoretically possible to build a cable that is tethered on Earth and would reach into space to 96,000 km (59,652 miles) where it would almost reach out to the Kármán Line, at an altitude of 100 km. The Kármán Line is the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space. The International Space Station is 330 km, and the moon is 384,400 km from Earth. As fans of Star Wars we've all seen that the giant destroyers and the Death Star are grey in colour. I always wondered if this grey colour might well be (if you were to think about it), some form of concrete. Concrete in space would be robust against the