Re: A never-ending study on how to mess up humans...
"Keeping the spin fairly slow, say about 2 rpm, would require a radius of some 50-60 meters at least.. a diameter comparable to the length of the international space station."
Early science fiction authors often had large rotating space stations with the "tyre" being the occupied bit. The problem of getting all that mass up there was ignored, so it was still really a "magical" solution. 2001 was still fantasy rather than science fiction, not because of the monoliths but because of the size of spacecraft required - rather as Gormenghast passed over in silence how a pre-industrial society could build and maintain such a huge edifice given the apparent human resource constraints.
Obviously we need a magical drive to push the craft at 1g to the half way mark and then decelerate at 1g all the way to landing. The journey would also be an awful lot shorter.
Perhaps the real solution to manned spaceflight is to stop messing about with inadequate vehicles and work seriously on physics to identify an energy supply which will actually get enough stuff up there to make things really feasible.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
