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According to spacex, the falcon 9 landing legs are made of carbon fiber with aluminum in a honeycomb shape. How much force would be needed to break that?

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  • The aluminum honeycomb is an impact absorber, colloquially known as "crush core". It's designed to "break" to attenuate landing loads. Maybe a better question would be how much energy would be necessary to overcome its capabilities? – Tristan Jun 29 '20 at 19:10
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    Or how much torque would be needed. The answers to @Tristan's comment and to mine is most likely a trade secret that SpaceX divulges only to NASA and to organizations that have signed a nondisclosure agreement with SpaceX. – David Hammen Jun 29 '20 at 22:39
  • @DavidHammen why do you say that? Musk typically offers a lot of design info to the world as well as , at least over at Tesla corp they will provide almost anything to folks who want to build more electric thingies – Carl Witthoft Jun 30 '20 at 12:12
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    @CarlWitthoft -- SpaceX ≠ Tesla. SpaceX has very explicitly held most of its knowledge as trade secrets while Tesla has patented a good portion of its intellectual properties (but even Tesla views key technologies as key and holds them as trade secrets). SpaceX has only a few patents assigned to it, almost all of which deal with spacecraft antenna design. Musk views China as SpaceX's long-term competition and views China's blatant disregard for IP law as a key reason to go the trade secret route as opposed to the patent route. – David Hammen Jun 30 '20 at 12:33
  • Quoting Musk, "We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China—if we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book." – David Hammen Jun 30 '20 at 12:34
  • Moreover, the US government mandates that a good portion of the IP developed by SpaceX must not be released to the public. The penalty is massive fines for the company and jail time for key personnel. There is very little difference between a rocket that puts a satellite into orbit versus a rocket that releases a payload that comes back to Earth halfway around the world and then explodes in a very grand finale. That concern does not exist for electric cars. – David Hammen Jun 30 '20 at 12:38
  • When you look at whether you decide to keep something as trade secret or patent it, one of the key factors is whether a competitor will be able to reverse engineer it. If it is easy to reverse engineer, patents are a better form of protection. Considering SpaceX retains control of its hardware, whereas Tesla does not, it makes sense that Tesla would patent its stuff while SpaceX would not. – Tristan Jun 30 '20 at 17:50

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