Page 29 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

—I’d probably never know, in the final analysis, if he actually did. Down here, where we float in a comforting soup of nondescription—charred and eyeless, Creation’s joke. Big Bang detritus bought with Jesus’ blood.

Ash, drifting free, from an eternally burning heaven.

Gemma Files is a Canadian horror writer, journalist, and film critic. Her novel, Experimental Film, won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the Sunburst Award for Best Canadian Speculative Fiction (Novel). Gemma is also a two-time Bram Stoker Award winner for her short fiction collections.

Project Starship: How Ceramics Could Build the Starships of Tomorrow

By Dr. Brittney Hauke

Ever since I was young, I’ve had an interest in science fiction. Growing up, my best friend and I would build elaborate Star Wars Lego scenes in his basement, which would span the room and cover every surface, and we’d often run between our yard (and through the neighbor’s) swinging around plastic lightsabers. Star Wars is probably the sci-fi series that has stuck with me for the longest, but my mom (a lifelong Star Wars and Star Trek fan) introduced me to Star Trek as well, and I remember watching Enterprise after I came home from Karate. I think it’s safe to say that my love of sci-fi is one of the reasons I become interested in science at a young age (but also shout out to the Slimey to the Moon Sesame Street arc, hands down one of the most formative things I watched as a child), and my love for immersive sci-fi has only grown as I’ve gotten older. While I enjoy suspending my disbelief, it’s also exciting to be able to use my scientific background in materials science, specifically glass and ceramics, to investigate these topics and see how they fit into our current scientific capabilities. Because as Author C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and one day some of these technologies may be closer to science than fiction.

A Brief History of Ceramics

Like glass, ceramics is an ancient material that has been around for thousands of years and is often overlooked as something we pour our morning coffee into or as a decorative art piece. The first humans were mixing clay with water and firing it as early as 28,000 BCE, during the late Paleolithic period, where small figurines have been found in the Czech Republic. Pottery appeared several thousand years later in Eastern Asia around 18,000-17,000 BCE, which eventually spread to other Eastern cultures, such as Japan. It was not until around 9,000 BCE that pottery became popularized as storage vessels for food and water, as well as being used for tiles and bricks. These ideas then spread outside of Asia to the Middle East and Europe. One of the most fundamental early breakthroughs in ceramics, the invention of the pottery wheel, would not occur until 3,500 BCE, allowing for the creation of pots with radial symmetry.

After World War II, ceramics became more integral to the growth of many technical fields, including electronics, optoelectronics, medical, energy, automotive, and most importantly for us, aerospace and space exploration. Ceramics can be generalized as nonmetallic, inorganic, crystalline materials that are extremely hard, chemically inert, and good electrical insulators. The high hardness, high melting point, low thermal shock resistance, high energy of ablation, corrosion resistance, chemical stability, and low thermal expansion are all advantageous to the aerospace industry.

Ceramics are most commonly made from compounds such as oxides, nitrides, carbides, and borides and are made following a similar method. First, raw materials are measured in the correct amounts, almost like baking, and then mixed into fine powders to ensure a uniform particle size and to remove impurities. Next, the ceramic part is shaped by some method like injection molding or pressing. Thinking in terms of pottery, this would be the stage where the clay is shaped into a bowl, for example. Next, the formed pieces must be dried carefully to remove moisture but ensure that no cracks form. Often, this takes place by firing in a kiln to temperatures around 1,800 to 2,000 °F, though it depends on the type of clay you’re working with. This gives the ceramic its usual porous appearance, but these pores aren’t very helpful for many applications and will soak up liquids. To protect the surface, a glaze is applied, and after it dries, a second firing takes place to melt the glaze and strengthen the ceramic.

Ceramics in the Aerospace Industry

One of the toughest challenges for current, future, and sci-fi space travel is simply, “How do we create a starship that can survive the various pitfalls of space and keep the people inside safe from harm?” With our current technological limitations, ceramics offer a good option due to all the reasons above, as well as being lightweight. Ceramics find their use largely in engine and exhaust systems and thermal protection shields.

One of the most well-known examples of ceramics being used in the aerospace industry are the tiles that were part of the Thermal Protection System (TPS) of the NASA Space Shuttle. These were glazed, porous ceramic tiles designed to minimize the amount of heat the bottom of the Space Shuttle was exposed to upon reentry, as well as protect against the chemical attack from ionized species present in the top layers of the atmosphere.

However, new advances in materials science are pushing the boundaries of what ceramics can do as materials. In general, composite materials are becoming popular in a variety of industries, and ceramic matrix composites (CMCs) are just one example. These are materials that incorporate ceramic fibers, made from carbon, silicon carbide, or silica, into some sort of matrix material, such as carbon, silicon carbide, or alumina. CMCs have many appealing properties over conventional “monolithic” ceramics, such as increased hardness and self-healing [1]. The addition of these short fibers improves crack resistance by “pinning” cracks or making it more difficult for large cracks to form in the matrix material by adding barriers that the cracks must go around.

Another category is called ultra-high-temperature ceramics (UHTCs) which, as the name implies, need to withstand temperatures of over 3,000 °C (5432 °F). Not only is having a high melting temperature critical for these materials, but it is also important that they do not oxidize readily. UHTCs include compositions such as silicon carbide, silicon nitride, zirconia, titanium boride, and zirconium diboride. The last one in that list has promising potential in hypersonic applications that require innovation cooling technology, such as passing coolant fluid through porous materials to reduce the temperature of a component [2]. What makes the borides such a great option is that they have a high hardness and temperature stability due to how the structure of the material is arranged. It has a hexagonal crystal structure, meaning that there are layers of boron atoms connected in rings that alternate with zirconium in a hexagonal array [3]. The bonds between the boron atoms and boron and zirconium atoms are strong, so higher amounts of energy are needed to break those bonds, leading to the desired properties.

Protecting Precocious Cargo

In the original Project Starship article, Graham McNeill and Richard Swan both cited that an important technical requirement of starships is to be able to withstand both the punishing barrages of space debris as well as enemy firepower.

In the Warhammer 40K universe, ceramite is a heat and shock-resistant material that most closely resembles our modern-day ceramics. It is used by the Imperium of Man as armor for infantry but also to protect their starships. Ceramite is said to be capable of absorbing and dissipating extreme thermal energy and energy-based attacks, as well as being able to conduct other forms of electromagnetic radiation to disperse it across a wide area. This makes it particularly good at providing protection against attacks from energy or particle-based weaponry.

Not only do starships have to deal with these advanced threats, like attacks from other ships, but simply traveling through space provides a host of opportunities to be struck by different types of debris. Earlier in the article I mentioned “energy of ablation”. This concept becomes important when dealing with asteroids, energy attacks, and reentering planetary atmospheres. Ablation is the removal of material, so choosing ceramics that have a high energy of ablation means that they can withstand large amounts of energy before any material is removed from the surface.

In particular, the self-healing properties of CMCs would be incredibly useful for ships where the main purpose is to be livable for long periods of time while traveling through space. A good example of this are the starships in the Archimedes Engine duology by Peter F. Hamilton, where massive ships must survive traveling in space for thousands of light years to find new inhabitable planets. Having outer ceramic armor that can heal itself from asteroid collisions would ensure these ships last for many years, as well as prevent the crew from having to stop frequently to conduct repairs.

Most likely, these futuristic ships will use a mixture of both CMCs and UHTC to provide mechanical toughness against physical impacts, but also to dissipate heat from energy-based attacks and atmospheric re-entry. Combining woven fibers of carbon and silicon carbide with UHT matrix materials could provide the same properties that ceramite has. But it’s also important to note that no single material will do the trick. For example, we still need glass for the windows of these ships, which will also need to be crack resistant and radiation hard to protect the travelers inside [4]. A slightly different type of composite material can be found in The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey. Those ships are made from a metal ceramic composite, most likely to take advantage of the heat transfer and light weight properties that the ceramic provides when compared to just strictly metal.

It’s safe to say that materials science continues to be an exciting field to work in, especially to see how our technological advances slowly bring us closer to our science fiction aspirations.

[1] Dhanasekar, S., et al. “A Comprehensive Study of Ceramic Matrix Composites for Space Applications.” Advances in Materials Science and Engineering, 2022, 6160591. https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/6160591

[2] McGilvray M, et al. “Ultra-high temperature ceramics for transpiration cooling applications in hypersonic vehicles.” Ultra-High Temperature Ceramics: Materials For Extreme Environment Applications V. ECI Symposium Series. ECI; 2022.

[3] Wuchina, E., et al. “UHTCs: Ultra-High Temperature Ceramic Materials for Extreme Environment Applications.” Electrochem. Soc. Interface, 2007, 16, 30. https://doi.org/10.1149/2.F04074IF

[4] L. Nemo, “Star power! How glass and ceramics push us deeper into space,” Am. Ceram. Soc. Bull. 2022, 101(9): 19–32.

Dr. Brittney Hauke is the Journals Managing Editor for the American Ceramic Society, where she helps run four different scientific journals devoted to ceramic and glass science. She received her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Penn State University, where she studied the structures and properties of oxide glasses. She also holds an M.S. in Materials Science from Arizona State University and her bachelor's degree in physics and studio art. Brittney also volunteers her time with the Society of Physics Students and is the co-chair for the 2028 Physics and Astronomy Congress. In her free time, she enjoys reading fantasy and sci-fi, building LEGOs, and playing video games.

Shadow Prisons of the Mind

By Caroline M. Yoachim

With the right overlays, the city was charming--apartment buildings done up like giant row houses, seamlessly blending Victorian and modern sensibilities, boutiques and cafes on tree-lined streets, parks bathed in sunshine. Vivian Watanabe had lived on this block, once, in a high-rise apartment painted cornflower blue with trim in teal and white. She couldn't see it now, not the way she used to. As a Shade, everything on this block was a featureless gray building. Which was the reality? Was it the colorful apartments nestled together, the bland gray buildings or something else entirely? Personal Implanted Perception chips made it impossible to know.