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Source: Breakfast -
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Kiwi scientists from Canterbury University are helping NASA design a new futuristic aircraft that will take astronauts to space without the aid of a huge rocket to get them there.
Associate professor Susan Krumdieck, an engineer who is part of the team, says they are helping to design a heat-shield for the craft.
She says they are growing material at a "nano-crystalline scale onto the outside of the next generation hyper-sonic space vehicle".
Krumdieck told TV ONE's Breakfast programme that the materials are likely to be made of ceramic, as the material does not corrode and is able to stand very high temperatures and that makes it perfect in using it to protect the outside of the new spacecraft.
But she says the ceramic cannot be painted or glazed onto the craft, like on a coffee cup.
"It has to be grown, molecule at a time and that's the process I am developing," Krumdieck says.
Describing the process as very similar to cooking in the kitchen, she says there are subtle differences to how many atoms of different things they can put in to create the perfect heat-shield.
"It's mostly aluminium oxide with some titanium dioxide maybe and some other additives added. Then we have to look at the way it is grown, the temperature, the rate of baking ... it's almost sort of like cooking."
Krumdieck says the reason for the ceramic coating is because once the spacecraft is at the leading edge of space, it is not pushing through the air anymore.
"It is just ramming into the molecules of air and that can get up to 2000 degrees, hot enough to melt almost anything and those ceramic materials can get very close to their melting point, but we're designing them so that they can actually self heal if they start to degrade."
She says the new style of coating will help advance space travel by making rockets redundant in the future. The new spacecraft will launch midair, mostly from an airplane, and will make use of scram jets to launch it into orbit and manoeuvre in space.
That, according to Krumdieck, will lead to space travel becoming cost efficient.
"You can make a lot more frequent trips and do a lot more in space, possibly even manufacturing."
She says there is unlikely to be metals used in the manufacture of spacecrafts in the future, with an emphasis on ceramic materials, which are better at higher temperatures.
The new craft is, according to NASA, going to look more similar
to the American B2 Stealth Bomber than the average shuttle that
most are used to.
