Is it just marketing or is there an actual structural difference?
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Marketing.
We dont use some super secret, 20% gold – aluminum alloy for stuff that goes into space. We use the same stuff we have for earthbound applications. Certain alloys might be more dominant in the space industry, but they arent “better”, rather, they have certain properties that are useful in space.
Even if the marketing was honest, it would just be a quality metric; you cant tolerate as much variability on a spacecraft as you can on a cooking pot. So “real” space grade aluminum might have X ultimate tensile strength plus or minus 0.001%, whereas the common industry grade might be X plus or minus 5%. In ordinary applications this variability makes no discernable difference, so there is no point to controlling it as precisely.
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