When carbon fiber was first trotted out in solid rocket motor cases and tanks in the 1960s, it was poised to not only take on fiberglass, but also a whole host of other materials.
What happened?
50 years later it’s still an exotic material. Sure, Batman’s got it in his suit, expensive cars feature smatterings of it in their dashboards and performance parts, but at $10 a pound on the low end, it’s still too pricy for wide-scale deployment. We’ve been using this stuff for decades. Where’s our materials science Moore’s Law to make this stuff cheap? Why is this stuff still so expensive?
September 24, 2011
