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RodbertDyck, I know this is going way back in the history of a very old thread, but a couple years ago you did the math showing that PCTFE thickness would be very high for a 6mx12m greenhouse. This paper mentions a way around that by using pillowing to decrease the radius of curvature and therefore put less force on the bladder. The pressure force would instead be mostly on the restraints between pillows, which could have much greater tensile strength than PCTFE. This would allow the PCTFE film to be quite thin.
Louis, the panels described in the paper are very light but they don't pack densely. The paper cited in the one you linked (with the 0.063 kg/m^2 panels) lists a volume of 0.055 m^3 per 35.3 m^2 of panel area. So for 10,000 m^2 of panels the volume would be 15.6 m^3.
Oldfart1939, isn't the cubesat on Earth?
I think you're right that they are not using Mars temperature/pressure. The article does state:
"Inside this hermetically sealed environment the CubeSat delivers nutrient rich water, controls the temperature for Mars day and night conditions and mimics Mars air pressure, oxygen and carbon dioxide levels."
However, I can't believe that could possibly be true. The oxygen levels would be orders of magnitude too low for aerobic respiration, and transpiration levels are inconveniently high for plants even at 10 kPa.
GW, I think what you are saying about vapor pressure being the relevant pressure the triple point is true.
But if the partial pressure of water is below the vapor pressure, then either evaporation or boiling will occur depending on the total pressure. In your example of 10 mbar CO2, the water should evaporate rapidly rather than boil, because the total pressure is high enough.
If what you were saying was true, water would boil at normal temperatures on Earth on a dry day (unless I misunderstood your previous comments, in which case I apologize).
RobS, There are several on the SpaceX forum on reddit who argue the figures on the website are for Block 5 rather than the current version, so 54t may well be the ultimate payload capacity of the falcon heavy.