[protocolture]

Interested in your choice of PLA for material.

I only read the first document so apologies if this is covered elsewhere.

But PLA tends to burn/melt/disintegrate in direct sunlight, I imagine its worse outside the atmosphere (Might not be an easily repeatable experiment in the UK however)

Just 1 more thing, the document itself is pretty good for high school. I dont remember touching Gantts and CAD until University so that experience in itself is probably going to be very useful when you hit major projects in your further studies. The failure here is going to help you succeed later. I was in a similar position in high school, I wanted to participate in the solar car challenge, however I couldn't motivate any other students to try or the school to invest in it. Everyone was more afraid of failing and "wasting time" when they should have seen exactly how educational even a failure would be.

[JohnOfOsgiliath]

To be fair, we probably should have mentioned that. We simply chose PLA because it is easy to manufacture with. Possibly, things could have gone south pretty quickly. If we do something similar again, we could use some fancy machined metal for the housing.

Yeah, I can definitely relate. Fortunately, we had a team who was kind of interested at the start, so we could work from there. To be honest, I've learned so much from this, it's definitly worth the time I put in.

[doctorwho42]

No need to do fancy metal, you can use pre-existing documents and standards about appropriate materials for space, vacuum, etc.

[JohnOfOsgiliath]

I looked it up and found this: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/nasa_std_601...

I quickly read through and found it fascinating.