Steel Construction Vol 40 No 1 - Architecturally Exposed Steel | Page 14

INDUSTRY NEWS TRENDS

Other beautiful examples on my recent
trips include The Reagan National
Airport in Washington DC and the San
Francisco International Airport in
California. The use of structural steel in
airport design is now an enduring and
spectacular architectural culture.

As a child, travelling through airports was a familiar scene to me.
However the one major change that I have witnessed in my life involves
the evolution of the framing system for most airports from concrete to steel.
It doesn’t end there. One of Pretoria’s greatest gifts to the world is a
man by the name of Elon Musk. Last August I took my nephew to
Cape Canaveral in Florida to visit one of Musk’s assembly plants.
Inside a huge steel framed building Space X, his company, was
building the Falcon 9 – a two stage launcher.
The way that space travel has been done to date involves throwing
away the launchers after escaping earth’s pull. This is the equivalent
of throwing away an aircraft after each landing. This has kept space
travel prohibitively expensive and generally beyond the reach of the public.
Space X completely revolutionised space travel this past December when the
Falcon 9 launcher that we visited took off and landed in one piece, thereby making it re-usable. Musk claims that this can
reduce the cost of launches by as much as 90%. The odds for space travel in our lifetimes have improved dramatically.

My nephew is so inspired by Musk’s vision
that he thought he should continue the
family legacy and promote the next
generation of travel by learning how to
fly one such spacecraft.

I wish him the best of luck!

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Steel Construction Vol. 40 No. 1 2016