Reply to post: Re: Bah!

Re: Bah!

@John Robson - yes, yes, but no brownie points for stating the obvious that the Earth's gravitational field is nearly as strong at the altitude of the ISS as it is at the surface of Earth, because you know as well as I do that what the poster you were responding to was on about was the need (in their view) for a rotating space station that thereby provides artificial gravity/pseudo gravity/insert term of your choice as a result of that rotation. I agree with them.

One of the things that I've found most frustrating about the decades since Apollo is that, so far as I'm aware, there have to date been no experiments put into orbit involving rotationally induced 'artificial gravity' in order to determine its effects on and usability for both plants and humans. I am very much hoping that at some point something of the sort will be tried, possibly using 2-3 Bigelow BEAM 330 units directly connected and spun at a very low rotational rate to give a very low 'artificial gravity'.

The point of this being that if there's any kind of obvious local 'down', then fluids behave as you'd expect fluids to behave, albeit maybe at a different rate to the one we're used to at the surface of Earth. Just seeing how that'd affect plants would be both fascinating and useful, but the big question is how would it affect astronauts?

Currently, they all get cold-like symptoms and a loss of appetite from fluid build up in the head. Add a little artificial G, and that effect is lessened or done away with altogether. So how much 'artificial G' is needed to eliminate this effect? What effect will the 'artificial G' have on loss of bone and muscle strength? Will the astronauts be able to sleep better in it? And ultimately, we need to get some solid data on what spin rate at what radius of rotation humans can actually tolerate for long periods, because at the moment the only data we have on that comes from earth-bound centrifuges where results are always skewed by the centrifuge itself being on the Earth's surface and thus NOT in free-fall.

At the moment what we have on the subject is, effectively guesswork. Very well educated guesswork, to be sure, but the sooner we get some solid experimental data on these things the better. And given Mr Musk's enthusiasm for getting people to Mars, and that Bigelow suddenly started ramping up prodcution capabilities a few months ago, I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone out there is thinking along the same lines. At some point, take two unmanned BEAM 330's and tether to each other with heavily over-engineered cables. Then steadily increase RPM and monitor effect on plant life within to get data on large-radii centrifugal environments. Eventually, and with appropriate safety measures, repeat again with a manned unit. Then we'll gather the kind of data we need to build 'classic' rotating space stations and deep interplanetary space manned ships.

The ISS? Yep, great achievement for its time, and I'm sure that it was the best that could be built under the circumstances (see earlier posts about NASA, contractors , subcontractors etc and whether what actually gets built is the best that technically could have been built). Circumstances have changed. Materials science has changed. We're ready for the next step. The ISS is the past of manned orbital flight - we now need to get cracking on the future of manned orbital space flight and interplanetary manned exploration.