pressure containment: not a major issue?

I've been thinking some more about containing air pressure in a space
habitat, and concluded that I (and most authors) have been making too
much of this. Please check my reasoning and let me know if I'm
overlooking something.

I was sipping a can of soda last night, and it occurred to me to look up
the internal pressure of an unopened soda can -- it turns out to be
around 2-4 atmospheres. Yet this is contained quite neatly by a very
thin aluminum wall. Pressure doesn't scale with size; 1 ATM is 1 ATM
whether it's a soda can or Rama. So, even that soda can is a couple
times thicker than the wall of a space habitat would have to be.
Suppose for a good safety margin, we make our pressure walls ten times
thicker than that -- it's STILL going to be a very tiny amount of mass
compared to the shielding and structural mass.

So, it seems to me that we really shouldn't be worrying about pressure
containment when choosing a geometry; containing 1 ATM is easy and won't
add much to the mass budget, no matter what shape we choose. (Of course
I realize that in the case of shapes that can buckle, the buckling
problem probably DOES scale with size, but I suspect that accounting for
this still leaves a much smaller amount of mass than that needed for
shielding and weight support.)

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
- Joe
.

Relevant Pages

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