While cute in a good way, can't help but feel this is a bit of a silly piece (though I think they're trying their best and it's nice to see more hopeful tech ne

While cute in a good way, can't help but feel this is a bit of a silly piece (though I think they're trying their best and it's nice to see more hopeful tech news vs the typical dreary disasters/panics). It's similar to coverage last year of the Kyoto University/Sumitomo Forestry satellite using wood which got a nod at the end. Ars Technica did a decent run down of that at the time [0], though reacting more to some of the "space junk" angles in mainstream media coverage vs cost. Wood, particularly when heavily treated, does have some interesting properties and it may stand on its own in that regard. But it won't be for cost, "green", "space junk", or any other such reasons it'll be purely about whether it serves a useful performance goal or not. As far as cost which this article mentions a bunch, even Starship's ultimate, genuinely paradigm shifting target costs to orbit are still something like $100/kg. Compared to $1000-10000+/kg it's easy to see why that's a huge deal, but the cost of any simple base component material going in would also still be comparatively near meaningless if it resulted in worse amortization. Stainless steel is single digit $/kg, even something like titanium is relatively speaking a minor contributor [1] vs the cost of production and complex parts that go into a sat or vehicle. For actually doing stuff on other worlds, vs sats/ships, it could be quite different though. Growing something like bamboo on Mars or wherever might well have quite favorable production ratios for bootstrapping vs shipping stuff. ---- 0: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/12/wooden-satellites-an-intriguing-idea-but-wont-solve-space-junk-problems/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/12/wooden-satellites-an... 1: https://www.metalary.com/titanium-price/ https://www.metalary.com/titanium-price/