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It is. From the article: "A rotating spacecraft would create artificial gravity that would keep astronauts in tip-top shape."

nkoren 14y ago
Strangely, the article fails to follow this up with the next logical sentence, which is: "Also, a rotating spacecraft is trivially easy to implement, meaning that the entire zero-gravity argument is nothing more than a ridiculous canard by those who'd rather suck down a few more tens of billions of pointless microgravity biomedical research before allowing us to leave Low Earth Orbit and do anything interesting."
- lotu 14y ago
  Nothing involving rocketry is trivially easy implement. To my knowledge building a centrifuge to produce artificial gravity has never been attempted, it would take years of work and tens or hundreds of million dollars to design, prototype, test, and man rate any such a system.
  - nkoren 14y ago
    Sure, you'd have to engineer it correctly and this would not be cheap. But in the context of all the other things you'd have to spend money on to do a successful Mars mission, it IS trivial. Artificial gravity can be as simple as putting your habitat at the end of a tether, with a counterweight (say your Mars injection stage) at the other end. That's about 1/100th the complexity of the Sky Crane manoeuvre that NASA just pulled off, and certainly nowhere near being one the "top 5" engineering challenges. Unfortunately, the approach for the last several decades has been to say "gosh, microgravity is scary, maybe we can RE-ENGINEER THE HUMAN BODY to can cope with it". That's a canard. Spam in a can at the end of a string is trivial in comparison.
- simonh 14y ago
  Sorry, but anybody who says anything never done before in space is 'trivially easy' has a serious credibility deficit.
  - iwwr 14y ago
    Lots of things have never been done before. This appears to be a case where it's used as an excuse not to do it.

nkoren 14y ago

Strangely, the article fails to follow this up with the next logical sentence, which is: "Also, a rotating spacecraft is trivially easy to implement, meaning that the entire zero-gravity argument is nothing more than a ridiculous canard by those who'd rather suck down a few more tens of billions of pointless microgravity biomedical research before allowing us to leave Low Earth Orbit and do anything interesting."

lotu 14y ago
Nothing involving rocketry is trivially easy implement. To my knowledge building a centrifuge to produce artificial gravity has never been attempted, it would take years of work and tens or hundreds of million dollars to design, prototype, test, and man rate any such a system.
- nkoren 14y ago
  Sure, you'd have to engineer it correctly and this would not be cheap. But in the context of all the other things you'd have to spend money on to do a successful Mars mission, it IS trivial. Artificial gravity can be as simple as putting your habitat at the end of a tether, with a counterweight (say your Mars injection stage) at the other end. That's about 1/100th the complexity of the Sky Crane manoeuvre that NASA just pulled off, and certainly nowhere near being one the "top 5" engineering challenges. Unfortunately, the approach for the last several decades has been to say "gosh, microgravity is scary, maybe we can RE-ENGINEER THE HUMAN BODY to can cope with it". That's a canard. Spam in a can at the end of a string is trivial in comparison.
simonh 14y ago
Sorry, but anybody who says anything never done before in space is 'trivially easy' has a serious credibility deficit.
- iwwr 14y ago
  Lots of things have never been done before. This appears to be a case where it's used as an excuse not to do it.