novel G-Lab concepts (was )

Al Globus alglobus@... [spacesettlers] wrote:

>> Possibly problematic here is the limited radius. The BA330 has an
>> internal radius of about 3m. That means, to get 1/3 G we need to spin
>> at 10 RPM.
>
> Put two BA330s on a tether and spin to get pretty much any radius you want.
>
> There are a few minor problems with docking :-)

Yes, anything that involves rotating the actual habitats raises large
cans of worms. The habitats were certainly not designed for those
stresses; how will they hold up? How do you dock? Do we have to invent
large rotating seals?

Obviously all those can be solved, but it makes it a project with a long
list of never-before issues, which raises the cost and risk of the
project substantially.

If you just put a centrifuge inside an otherwise ordinary station, which
is operating in exactly the way it was designed to do, then all those
risks disappear.

Eventually of course we WILL have rotating space stations, and probably
ones that were designed for it from the ground up rather than cobbled
together out of other parts. But the design of those would be very
usefully informed by variable-G research, so there's something of a
chicken-and-egg problem there. But putting a centrifuge inside an
ordinary microgravity space station neatly cracks that one too.