Satellites encased in wood are in the works | Hacker News Reader

Satellites encased in wood are in the works

economist.com

74 pointsandsoitis50 comments

I could have sworn I remember hearing about some historical satellites involving wood in some way and I guess it was this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanhui_Shi_Weixing

>The successful recovery of an FSW-0 recoverable satellite in 1974 established China as the third nation to launch and recover a satellite

>A novel feature of the spacecraft's re-entry module was the use of impregnated oak, a natural material, as the ablative material for its heat shield.

Edit: There's more! As usual, Scott Manley has it covered https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtxYP9fLMmk

If we're sharing Youtubers, I can recommend BPS Space video on ablation, which is a really cool, hands-on introduction to the subject backed up by experiment and actual manufacturing.

https://youtu.be/UkLExdiz8jY

That video doesn't seem to be about using wood in Satellites at all.

That’s correct: it was stated to be about ablation.

That’s what I took from GP saying “I can recommend BPS Space video about ablation” followed by their opinion of the video.

I’m curious, what did you take from them saying “video about ablation” that made you think the video was about ‘wood in satellites’? How does one get from A to B here?

I want to be perfectly clear that I understand the thread we’re in right now is about wood and satellites. I want to TRY to understand how you read their comment so I can understand the confusion.

It was about ablation of wood as a material. Not ablation in general. In a thread about using wood for satellites.

dude, what?

    A: i'm really interested in things that are red. here's one: firetrucks.
    B: here's a neat thing which is green: unripe tomatoes.
    A: um, that's not red.
    C (you): wow why would you possibly think that the thing was red? they explicitly stated it was green. not sure what comment you read.

do you understand how out of place B's comment was to begin with?

I think B would be more accurate as "check this out: this one place has green firetrucks"

I already stated that I understand the thread that we are in. I’m beginning to think that you don’t and didn’t read where I said that (as an attempt to head off this very reply), or the ggp comment itself, or the OP comment ggp replied to.

The whole thread is about space. The comment they replied to both shared a YouTube video and discussed ablations, so they brought a contribution to the thread: Here’s this interesting video from a space YouTuber in case anybody is curious about ablative materials in rocketry.

What did you bring to the conversation by remarking that the video that they shared was not about wood in satellites? They’d already said so; it was a Captain Obvious level response.

I have at least brought curiosity as to why you felt that was a meaningful contribution and how you could have arrived at such a dismissive statement from a place of curiosity.

I take it that despite being in a thread about wood being used as an ablative material for satellites, you have no curiosity about ablative materials in the devices that transport said satellites?

Did you think that they misunderstood what thread they were in? Their comment was relevant and welcome. Frankly, yours was against HN guidelines, and I was trying to politely draw attention to that fact by getting you to analyze your conclusion.

I know we’re not supposed to make comments that don’t contribute anything, but that’s really hckin cool.

* have mercy on me dang

> that’s really hckin cool.

Not during reentry it’s not.

https://archive.is/3qot3

Related (same company) on this recycled post from econo:

Wooden satellite heads to space in Mars exploration test (105 points, 2024, 71 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42051687

Japan to launch first wooden satellite to combat space pollution (55 points, 2024, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39414641

Related - different company:

Woodsat: A Space Agency Will Launch a Tiny, Wooden Satellite (105 points, 2021, 18 comments)https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27549097

Interesting… apparently the advantages are:

    * cheaper material
    * naturally dampens vibrations -> can potentially help sensitive instruments
    * naturally insulates heat better -> saves power on heating
    * doesn't block radio frequencies -> lower drag in low orbits -> 50% longer orbital time
    * fully burns up on re-entry

Cheaper material isn't really an argument here.

Common aluminium and titanium alloys are dirt cheap. Doubly so in aerospace context.

Wood's even cheaper. Been to the hardware store recently?

You're right though. I really doubt the cost of the aluminium is relevant to any satellite. It costs over 10k to launch the smallest cubesat.

Yeah am not even sure prime quality mahogany (proposed here) is cheaper than aluminium at all.

The outer shell of WISA Woodsat (a different wood satellite) is made from birch plywood.

There are some nice pics here: https://kitsat.fi/2022-04_one-year-after-making-our-project-...

Sadly, I don't think it was ever launched.

Wonder about suitability for habitat construction, especially extraterrestrially. Apparently some plants have been grown in regolith samples. Would be wild if there’s a way to close the cycle on building materials very quickly.

downsides is that wood is porous and full of things that dont do well in extreme cold and vacuum. These wont last long, will become very brittle, and have the potential of offgassing things that hardware doesnt like.

It's really interesting to me that people write these sort of messages in this context. The context being multiple companies with actual material scientists that think this is viable, and that are investing actual dollars into this idea.

My first assumption when thinking about wood is the one that you are having. But my second assumption would be that they've probably thought about the same things.

We are in a post-hyperloop, post-spinlaunch, post-theranos, post-oceangate world. You can't trust that any project is not just there to generate VC hype.

But we are talking about multiple companies considering the same approach. By definition it shouldn't be vapourware.

I would imagine the wood would be processed.

Conditions in space are extreme but at least they are stable and known so i'd bet we would know how to treat the wood for this environment.

"Engineered wood" is a whole field. It's basically an organic composite, a slightly more flexible form of carbon fiber.

Take another look at the article; it addresses exactly this.

For what it's worth, cork is also a large component of heat ablation shields - my understand is that it's at the sweet spot of insulation and machinability/flexibility. Processed cork is a surprisingly technical material.

(https://amorimcorksolutions.com/en-us/our-brands/amorim-tps/)

Next, we'll be building Treeships.

https://hyperioncantos.fandom.com/wiki/Treeship

Some Silicon Valley startup will probably come up with the innovative idea of building ships from wood and propelling them with wind power. As long as they are adding AI it will probably be worth a few billion investment .

This would be too reasonable.

There's been trials of sails for cargo ships.

Propelling ships with hydrogen or methane made with wind power is the most probable path for fuel in the next decades.

worth a punt

Came here to see if anyone would make a reference to the Yggdrasill. I was not disappointed!

Hyperion is a great read for anyone looking for their next scifi book BTW. :)

I wonder if they thought about offgassing... Even without materials as flimsy as that, offgassing from things one totally won't expect it is a big problem with satellites. Heat cycles due to night/day side changing every 90 minutes or so + vacuum, makes it a really hard problem to solve. Just can't expect it to work with wood.

I am sure they thought about it. I mean, that’s the first thing that comes to mind and I never really studied wood. So I am not going to assume that they ignored the obvious.

That said, wood can be treated to remove quite a lot of stuff, leaving behind a strong porous structure that can be filled with various things to tweak its properties.

may be a material of future - "compressed" wood stronger and lighter than steel https://www.fastcompany.com/91334748/superwood-stronger-than...

"has a 50% greater tensile strength than steel and a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better. "

"Regular" wood is already good enough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascent_MKE

It's hardly "regular wood" though, as the structure mentioned was constructed using a specific kind of engineered compressed wood:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InventWood

> In 2018, [Liangbing] Hu's laboratory reported that partially removing lignin from natural wood and then compressing the remaining cellulose under heat produced a material roughly three times denser than the original timber and an order of magnitude stronger in bending and tension.[2] The material was commercially named Superwood.

> [2]: https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fnature25476 | https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476

No, it was glulams, CLT, and LVLs. Nothing compressed particularly hard, just enough for the glue to hold.

what about bamboo? could that be "compressed" and used? bc that stuff grows like crazy and is easy to harvest.

It’s called engineered bamboo [1] but it’s not widely used yet as a load bearing material because manufacturers are still working on certifying it with building code organizations (and it may not be strong enough).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_bamboo

that's really cool!

i'm no expert at this stuff, but i used to live in a home that had a bamboo garden maintained by a housemate. that stuff was so strong, i used it to make a box lol

Bamboo is orthotropic so it’s strong parallel to its fibers but much weaker perpendicular to them whereas wood is adapted to grow in both directions at the expense of being much slower. When you start adding fasteners (screws, nails, etc) bamboo starts to split along the fibers, becoming brittle and weakening the entire support structure.

That’s not to say it’s not strong enough necessarily, but building with bamboo requires different construction techniques and people are still working on validating its safety and updating building codes, which takes decades.

Nile red made a fun video about the original prototype (transparent wood)!

Lately high-rise buildings made of wood have been going up in Japan, too:

https://metropolisjapan.com/why-wooden-architecture-is-makin...

https://www.decn.co.jp/?p=167777

https://www.obayashi.co.jp/en/works/detail/work_2753.html

And Norway. Mjøstårnet [0] claims to be the worlds tallest wooden building at 85.4m.

[0]: https://www.moelven.com/mjostarnet/

Wood is surprisingly fire-resistant in the short term. Charring is super effective!

https://archive.md/3qot3

Uh...nothing new here....been done many, many years ago because...easy way to stealth a satellite...

Clever idea to avoid the aluminum

Ok clanker

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