I had an interesting chat today with Dr. Martin Bermudez, CEO/Senior Architectural Engineer of Skyeports. Dr. Bermudez is going for a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts grant and getting encouragement from a NIAC advisor whose guidance was to position it as something helpful to do on the Moon.

After reading some of the Skyeports information, SSI President Gary C Hudson said:

“My personal view is that it is challenging to produce a safe pressure vessel using glass, but it obviously has been done for portholes and such. The reason why it is risky is that most metals (and fabrics like Bigelow’s hulls) have graceful failure modes. Material stretches at the yield point and doesn’t fail until ultimate strength limit is reached. The margin between yield and ultimate is what constitutes “toughness.” Unfortunately, glass has very little margin between those two points, so when it goes … it goes. Nevertheless, we should encourage exploration of novel ideas like this!”

The Skyeports website has some interesting reading. Take a look at: https://www.skyeports.com

What do you think about it?

We’ll mention it on the SSI Facebook ( https://www.facebook.com/SpaceStudiesInstitute ) and LinkedIn ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/space-studies-institute ) pages, if you on either of those, we’d like to read your thoughts.

Robin Snelson
Executive Director
Space Studies Institute
ssi.org