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Space stations need spin gravity for long duration use. As far as living on other planets goes: there is gravity. What we don't know is how much gravity we nee
by api 2y ago
Space stations need spin gravity for long duration use.
As far as living on other planets goes: there is gravity. What we don't know is how much gravity we need. We could answer this with a space station with spin gravity by trying different rotational velocities and monitoring the health effects.
The Moon has about 1/6 Earth gravity. Is that enough? We don't know. Mars has a little over 1/3.
Long duration space flight probably needs spin gravity too. There are two ways to do it. One is a torus shaped spacecraft. The other is two spacecraft and a tether where once they insert themselves into their cruise transfer orbit they link, extend the tether, and start orbiting each other in a spin configuration. People could go between the ships if necessary by following the tether, though this would probably only be done when strictly necessary due to the risks.
There's a calculator online for spin gravity based on what we currently know about human tolerance for the Coriolis effect:
https://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/ https://www.artificial-gravity.com/sw/SpinCalc/
It's not too bad. There are various workable sweet spots. Playing around I find one at 20 meter radius and 0.66g (2/3) gravity. It looks like you can't get much smaller than 15 meters diameter without ill effects, but we actually don't know. We need to try this to see what humans can actually adjust to.
The simplest test short of a centrifugal station would be to put two capsules or Starships in orbit and tether them and experiment with different tether lengths and rotational velocities.
Edit: actually there's a third way to do gravity on long duration flights. If you watched/read The Expanse you saw it. Accelerate to the midpoint, flip, decelerate to the destination. Unfortunately that requires insane physicsts' nightmare propulsion systems like the fusion engines in The Expanse that we do not have and won't have for the foreseeable future unless there are some crazy fusion breakthroughs.
- aftbit 2y agoYeah if we had some kind of unlimited propulsion systems, the Expanse trajectory would be optimal in so many ways. Forget about transfer orbits - just point at the target and burn. The Expanse subreddit has a lot of people doing math on such things. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/comments/128c8rv/update_interactive_diagram_of_a_flip_and_burn/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExpanse/comments/128c8rv/update_...
- api 2y agoAFAIK the Epstein drive from The Expanse is pretty much at the edge of known physics in terms of being plausible, with a few additional caveats. The biggest of these is that IRL those ships would have to have large heatsinks. Even if the drive were phenomenally efficient you're going to have a minimum of hundreds of megawatts of waste heat to radiate into space to avoid melting the ship. The second one is that the drive itself would be a deadly weapon. Those scenes in The Expanse where they fire up the drive near other ships or near space stations? Nope, not unless you want to fry everyone on board with X-rays. You wouldn't fire up a drive anywhere near anything you didn't want to cook with hard radiation. This last point is known as Jon's Law in space engineering and sci-fi: any sufficiently powerful space drive is also by definition a weapon of mass destruction.
- wnoise 2y agoAlso known as the Kzinti Lesson, from Niven's "Known Space". https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WeaponizedExhaust https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WeaponizedExhaus...