Space, the final frontier

2349 readers

13 users here now

c/space Rules

Submissions must be related to Space
No sensationalist/ misleading/ unscientific content
No spam
No low-effort or meme images

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Wild Plan Emerges To Turn An Asteroid Into A Space Station Crawling With Spider Robots (hothardware.com)

submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

5 comments fedilink hide all child comments

If you've ever sat around wondering "why can't we just hollow out an asteroid, make it spin, and then live on it?" know that you're not alone. In fact, a research team from the University of Rochester did a semi-serious study of the matter and put together a comprehensive plan about how one might go about doing such a thing. It doesn't require any exotic tech (though it's a bit beyond what we're currently capable of), and would "only" cost on the order of $34 billion according to the team.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Something so small would have to spin so fast that the sun would look like a strobe light. You'd have to orient it so that the inside never sees the sun, but it'll always be night.

That said, I love the idea of building halos, and can't wait for them to be commonplace.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

No it wouldn't. The paper is talking about structures on the kilometer scale. In particular, the abstract talks about a 3 km radius habitat simulating 0.3 g of gravity. This would require spinning at only 0.3 RPM. Even if they wanted Earth gravity, it would only require 0.55 RPM. Neither of those are anywhere close to strobe light territory.

EDIT: The above was referring to the University of Rochester's paper, not to Dr. Jensen's paper. I didn't realize they were two different papers. Dr. Jensen's proposal is for a slightly smaller 2.5 km radius station. This doesn't change my point any though. Assuming a worst case of Earth gravity would still only require spinning the station at 0.6 RPM. (You can actually go quite a bit smaller than either of those proposals without turning the thing into a rave. A 224 meter radius would still only need to spin at 2 RPM to generate Earth gravity, for example.)

load more comments (1 replies)