We developed a way to facilitate the assembly in space by making foldable units that minimize the need to do physical assembly parts of a spacecraft. We are certain the best way to do assembly in space with as little problems or risks, is to do as little assembly as possible, thus making the concept of an already premade deployable structure a great idea.

The main concept is really simple, the spacecraft would be compressed in a specific way to save as much space as possible. This way would be based in the Ten Fold Technology by overlapping some stuff in the interior, making all walls bendable so they can all be stocked in a same space, and setting everything that normally would be external to the spacecraft but still connected to it (like the solar panels) as bended and close to the outside of the main body of the structure. We plan to make the folded spacecrafts to have the specific shape of a 3D hexagon because of the structural strength that it possesses.

The deployment of the spacecraft will work using an X opening system to deploy all it's elements.

Figure 1: X Operating System.

We plan to make the structure of austenitic stainless steel (254 SMO), as the stainless steel it is a strong material proved by it's use in the Canadarm where it was used in order to "meet the strength requirements" as said in The Canadian Encyclopedia. And we decided on the austenitic part because a report called "Corrosion of Stainless-Steel Tubing in a Spacecraft Launch Environment" published in NASA's page states how the austenitic stainless steel was the less corrosive of various steels that were tested and the austenitic stainless steel tube is fairly cheep, with the approximate price of US $1000-6000/Ton provided by NEXUS.

We thought of the possibility of using graphene because, as provided by NIKKEI Asia, the lowest price for it's production, by Osaka Gas, was about $82.39 dollars per kilogram and it's properties are immense. Said in the article of "Graphene in Space" by Caltech, NASA, the graphene it's "as strong as it is is thin" also, some of it properties are: zero-gap semiconductor, almost no mass, electron waves propagate within a single-atom layer, displays remarkable electron mobility at room temperature, has almost no resistivity, has strong magnetic fields, has high opacity for an atomic monolayer in vacuum, is the strongest material tested, and we could keep going with the properties, but that's enough to show the amazing characteristics that it has and enough to understand that it would be really good for use. The reason we decided not to use it is because two articles showed the derived toxicity of exposure to graphene. One of this articles, published by the Canary Islands Occupational Medicine Teaching Unit (Unidad Docente de Medicina del Trabajo Canarias) in Spain, states that N. V. Srikanth Vallabani et al (2011) linked graphene oxide together with the toxicological aspects related to cytotoxicity and apoptosis in normal human lung cells. In the second article, made by the Advanced Materials Research Center S. C. (Centro de Investigación en Materiales Avanzados, S. C.), says that graphene has "high danger and toxicity". So, looking at these two articles, we concluded not to make use of graphene until more research is made about it because we can't compare the stainless steel with the graphene if it isn't completely investigated, or it would be a invalid comparation. We also take in consideration that in space suits, lead, which is toxic for humans, is used but we also know that there has been a complete research about a material that can cover effectively the element so there's no danger for the person that uses the suit, but for now, there's no research for a material that can do the same but for the graphene so, stainless steel for the structure.

The project also includes the outer protection for the structure which will be a combination of Kevlar and Epoxy Resin as the Kevlar is an "impact-resistant material" as mentioned in the article "Home, Space Home" provided by NASA that we need to protect the inner structure from outside dangers; and we chose the Epoxy Resin because in an article published by MachineDesign called "Epoxies and adhesives fit for space" and a NASA publication named "Graphite/epoxy composite adapters for the Space Shuttle/Centaur vehicle" both presented the epoxy resin as an already used and experimented adhesive that passed the ASTM E595 test (Standard Test Method for Total Mass Loss and Collected Volatile Condensable Materials from Outgassing in a Vacuum Environment) which we will be needing as glue.

We hope to achieve a way to put a spacecraft with the basic structural necessities already implemented (light, energy, pressure) easily in orbit, with the least problems possible.