Explainer
Materials that survive vacuum
Space does not crush a spacecraft. It bakes, freezes, and quietly pulls the wrong chemicals out of it.
Vacuum is not a force squeezing the hull. A spacecraft is already a pressure vessel for the people and the electronics inside. The outside problem is everything the air no longer does for you. There is no convection, so heat only leaves by radiation or by a pipe you designed. Surfaces in sunlight get hot. Surfaces in shadow get very cold. The same panel can swing between those every orbit.
The second problem is outgassing. Plastics, tapes, and some coatings release molecules when the air pressure drops. Those molecules stick to cold lenses and solar arrays. Flight hardware is baked on the ground, in a vacuum chamber, until the worst of that has already left. A hobby epoxy that smells fine in a garage can fog a camera in orbit. This is why “space-rated” is a test record, not a colour of paint.
Radiation and atomic oxygen do the slow damage. In low Earth orbit, atomic oxygen erodes some polymers the way a very patient sandpaper would. Farther out, charged particles bother electronics more than metal. That is a parts problem: which chip, how it is shielded, how the software notices a bit flip. It is not solved by making the wall thicker until the rocket cannot lift it.
The materials you actually see in photographs are chosen for boring reasons. Multi-layer insulation looks like gold foil because the outer layer is often a coated plastic film, and the gold colour is a happy accident of the coating. Radiators are painted or finished so they emit heat. Nothing in that stack is there to look like a film.