Quote:
Originally Posted by AEAJR
I am very excited to hear that the USA is planning to go back to the Moon and to Mars.
The exploration of space will drive the nations of the world to work together and to advance the state of human knowledge. New materials will be invented and new engineering will be invented to overcome the challenges.
As to artificial gravity, I don't think they are likely to come up with that any time soon. What i have read about is simulated gravity where they spin the living portion of the ship.
If they spin the ship I would imagine they would need to do something to attach the people to the perimeter in terms of mildly magnetic boots or similar. Otherwise the ship might spin but the people would just float in zero gravity above the deck.
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Ed is correct. Simulated gravity is relatively simple and achieved by spinning the ship as he suggests. There is no current technology and going out on a small limb here I'd suggest nor is there likely to be any future technology to generate artificial gravity. The only way to generate gravity is with mass, exactly what you don't want in a spacecraft. You have to have enough fuel accelerate it then decelerate it at your destination and to generate 1g, you need a lot of mass. Around about the mass of the Earth.
To generate simulated gravity the ship needs to rotate, the spin speed required is related to the radius. The passengers in contact with the inside of the spinning portion of the ship would experience a force exerted on their feet by the centripetal acceleration that would feel like gravity. Once in motion, they would not need magnetic boots. However this force would be zero for an astronaut positioned on the rotational axis of the ship. To generate 9.8m/s/s, the same gravity as Earth, a 40 m diameter ship would need to spin at about 6.7 RPM. This in turn may cause motion sickness to the passengers. However it becomes much more practical as the diameter increases. A 400m diameter ship if it were possible to build one that big, only needs to rotate at 2 rpm. See the attached table for examples of other diameters.
Joe