Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your intuition is spot on, carbon fiber is much better at tensile loads than compressive loads. Tensile load capacity is pretty much the resin that keeps the fibers from moving. The most I could find about the design > The entire pressure vessel is comprised of two titanium hemispheres, two matching titanium interface rings, and the 142 cm (56") internal diameter, 2.4-m (100") long carbon fiber wound cylinder – the l…
Aren't most/all materials much stronger in tensile load than compressive loads, because of buckling anomalies?
Buckling is not a material failure, it's a structural failure. In pure buckling [0], the strength of the material is not actually a factor in whether something buckles or not. In most cases, material failure does occur as a side effect of the buckling, but not always. (The material's stiffness does matter, though. All else equal, something that's more flexible will buckle sooner than something stiff.)