
How can we create artificial gravity? |Magnitude Spaceship Feasibility
When astronauts work in space, they face the loss of gravity, so how can artificial gravity be created to maintain the strength of their bones and muscles?
Now, we see the people inside the spaceship; they can walk freely, like on earth. It does this by harnessing centrifugal force.
See why NASA developed this giant centrifuge to test its ability to simulate gravity in the 1960s. Here we are looking from an inertial frame of reference.
Follow us with key moments and brief below:
1:15: Centrifugal force
In a frame of reference, the centrifugal force is purely a real and measurable force pushing him downwards, like gravity. The only fictitious thing is his perception of what caused it. This happens because in physics and engineering, we have to balance forces. The system must be in equilibrium.
To make this happen, we need a huge ship, which will be extremely expensive to get into orbit. The acceleration your body will experience is proportional to the speed and radius of the space station. We can calculate what the space station gravity V from 2001 in the Space Odyssey will generate with some pretty simple math.
2:00 Space Station Size
The space station V
Space station V is 300 meters in diameter and spawns its axis every 60 seconds. That would put its gravity on par with the moon. For it to have the same gravity as earth, it would need to rotate once every 24 seconds. If we were to make this a realistic size, such as the International Space Station, it would need to rotate every 10 seconds.
Another problem we run into on smaller stations like this is the slope and acceleration you'll get because acceleration is proportional to the distance to the center of rotation; your head will be under less artificial gravity than your feet.
This will push blood to your legs, just like when you spin a bucket of water around. This effect diminishes for larger stations. So to create a realistic space station with artificial gravity, the station would have to be huge, and simply too expensive.
Elysium space station
Elysium space station is 60 kilometers wide and estimated to weigh about a million metric tons. It would take 18382 launches to bring the materials of Elysium into space with current technologies.
3:10 Cost
Although it is difficult to estimate the cost of a project, we can use the International Space Station as an example. It has been estimated that it has cost around 150 billion dollars. Thirty-six shuttle flights were needed to bring the materials to the space station. A conservative estimate for the costs of Elysium could be put at 5 trillion dollars.
When it comes to planning a project, one of the most important factors that we have to consider is the availability of aluminum. It would take around 10 years for the entire world to produce enough aluminum to build the space station. This would result in a huge increase in the cost of the materials.
5:00 Conclusion
Our only hurdles are launch costs and material availability. Something on the scale of SpaceStation V would be easily achievable. Who knows, maybe we'll be traveling into space as tourists in the near future. Again, thanks for watching.
