Highly evolved plants

Usage examples of composites.

Father Lemoyne and Bok, the astronomer, are also people I know, composites of many people I have met and worked with over the years.

A factor which Watson overlooks in his enthusiasm for asteroid mining is that if buckytube composites can be made cheap enough to make a space elevator possible they will entirely replace steel as a structural material.

The trend of replacing metals with composites is already well established in the aerospace and automotive industries, and fiberglass is now being used instead of steel in reinforced concrete structures.

When you consider that carbon-carbon composites made with graphite already demonstrate strength-to-weight ratios ten or more times better than steel, the structural potential of buckytubes becomes clear.

Buckytube composites can reasonably be expected to have a strength-to-weight ratio a thousand times better than steel.

If zero gravity turned out to be the key to mass production, buckytube composites would be worth building in orbit even with today's launch costs, although the demand would not be very high at that price.

The ground-to-space "beanstalk" space-elevator system and the electromagnetic launcher discussed in the story are two of the most dramatic examples, but, like fiberglass and graphite epoxy composites, they would find their way into everything from aircraft to sports equipment.

The stronger the material the less it needs to be tapered, but if we consider carbon-fiber epoxy resin composites, the strongest material we can currently build things with, the appropriate taper (about two and a half thousandths of a degree) for a cable just a millimeter in diameter at the ground produces a cable two kilometers in diameter at geosynchronous Earth orbit and massing sixty trillion metric tons.

These techniques, using high-strength polyaramid composites as the material of choice, would allow a tower three thousand kilometers high.

It will be very obvious that by this method we may find as many consecutive composites as ever we please.

Some elements were forms on which the fuselage would take shape, in composites and ceramics.

Even the humans at the top of the campaign for a human return to orbit had promoted chemical rockets as the way to go, because that was the way humans historically had done it, those were the plans they apparently did have, and because it was easier to sell a historical concept to the dim lights of the Human Heritage Party who had fallen into bed with them, politically speaking, than it was to sell the technologically more complex reusable vehicle that depended on the composites manufacturing facility they didn't want to fund.

Bok and Lemoyne are, likewise, composites of people I have known, including a few Jesuits who are among the world's leading geologists.

The characters of your story will be composites, based partly on this person, partly on someone else and partly, inevitably, on yourself.

All manner of contemporary river craft plied the languorous yet muscular stream: sailboats whose ultralight fabrics responded automatically to shifts in wind speed and direction,hovercraft built up out of ultralight composites, MAG barges which utilized the minute differences in electric charge between air and water to lumber along several centimeters above the surface of the water, big powerboats, tiny super fast pleasure craft, and land-based skimmers.