Fly To Mars In A Plastic Ship

saskboy writes "NASA reports that an old polymer may be the spaceship material of the future. Polyethylene is in household garbage bags, and it is also an effective solar radiation shield. I learned three years ago in astronomy class that polyethylene is used in the sleeping quarters on current orbiting space vehicles, but now NASA has developed a way to toughen the polymer into a product they call RXF1 which is 'even stronger and lighter than aluminum'. As you may know, radiation in space is currently a major obstacle to manned missions outside of the Earth's magnetic field, so better radiation shielding is essential to planned manned missions to Mars and beyond. Get the mp3 podcast of the article here."

Comments

Nasa

[3.09 a hour]

Why in Bush's name are we cutting fuding to nasa? After this alumna-plastic and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature= 490 aerogel, seems to me they are doing cutting edge USEFULL research.

Polyethylene

[chroma]

Polyethylene is one of the most commonly used plastics in the world, and is found in plastic grocery bags, cutting boards, milk jugs, disposable cups, and about a million other things. It's very stretchy, and thus is unlikely to break. It's tough, so that when it gets a hole or crack, the structure keeps its integrity. That's why I use it for armor on my fighting robots.

According to MatWeb, Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene (UHMW-PE) has an ultimate tensile strength of about 40 MPa, while 7075 alloy aluminum has an ultimate tensile strength of 524 MPa . The article claims that this new PE-derived material has a tensile strength 3x that of aluminum. I find a 40x improvement in tensile strength a bit tough to believe.