3 ms·
The first thing that comes to my mind is that you either have to commit to have the entire habitable portion of a station be rotating, or you have to have some
by elihu 5y ago
The first thing that comes to my mind is that you either have to commit to have the entire habitable portion of a station be rotating, or you have to have some kind of rotating joint that connects the rotating and non-rotating parts of the station. That joint has to not leak air and be very reliable (if it seized up, the station could tear itself apart from the sudden torque).
Having the whole habitable part of the station rotate may be fine most of the time, but it makes docking with ships more complicated. If the ship can't be spun, then you can either use some kind of rotating docking collar (which doesn't have to be perfectly airtight if it's only used once in awhile, but it still has to be pretty good) or you have put on a suit and do a spacewalk just to move things back and forth between the station and the ship which sounds kind of inconvenient.
(I guess there's actually another solution which is to stop the station spin whenever docking with a ship. That costs energy and/or reaction mass, though, and you'd have to deal with whatever disruption switching to zero-gravity brings.)
I can see why they might not have wanted to deal with this for ISS, but maybe for a bigger/more ambitious space habitat we'll want to do it.
- Valgrim 5y agoRegarding your idea of stopping the station rotation: a simple way to do it would be to spin a flywheel contained inside the station. It wouldn't need to be very heavy if it spins very fast. Another possibility is to have the docking station completely disconnected from the outer ring atmosphere, and to use small "elevators cabins" attached to robotic arms to go from the ships to the rings and vice-versa.