Click all you want. The interior of a Stanford Torus, a structure in outer space which rotates to generate artificial gravity equivalent to Earth gravity. Painting by Don Davis courtesy of NASA.
The Stanford Torus was the principal design considered by the 1975 NASA Summer Study, which was conducted in conjunction with Stanford University (and published as Space Settlements: A Design Study, NASA Publication SP-413). It consists of a torus or donut-shaped ring that is one mile in diameter, rotates once per minute to provide Earth-normal gravity on the inside of the outer ring, and which can house 10,000 people.
13 comments:
Good Lord, what a spectacular disaster it would be if it ever stopped turning.
It would have to be built with what I call the Impossible Principle...build it so it can't not work. This principle used to be possible, but things have gotten so complicated now that everything that man builds is now destined to fail at some point.
All the misery and woe and accidents and fear and political anger that nuclear reactors have caused in the past 60 years ... they ALMOST never happened.
in 1951 meeting in a rented little red schoolhouse in San Diego, Freeman Dyson and Edward Teller were central figures in an experimental team for General Atomics to develop the model for the first commercial nuclear power reactors. Here was their criterion:
You can let a high school class visit the control room, leave them alone for an hour, let them turn any knobs and press any buttons, and they can't possibly cause a dangerous accident or meltdown.
The design used the laws of physics to automatically and instantly shut itself down when anything went haywire or strayed beyond safe parameters.
They succeeded, and I think GA even built a small working model that obeyed your Impossible Principle. It's still the model which big hospitals use for itty-bitty on-site reactors to cook up short-lasting radioactive medical isotopes -- stuff you can't have shipped to the hospital because its active medical half-life would render it useless, stuff that has to be used within a day of being cooked.
But the High School Kid-Proof model wasn't used for big commercial nuclear reactors. The industry went with the Three Mile Island / Chernobyl / Windscale model instead. Where you can leave professionally trained adults alone in the control room, and they can press any button and turn any knob and ...
ADDENDUM:
I suspect that life on a Stanford Torus is a lot like life on an ocean-going ship, where bad weather makes everybody batten down the hatches and secure all loose gear. Everything has Velcro or a hook or snaps or bunji cords, and there's a small emergency pedestrian Velcro track, and the complementary kind of Velcro on the bottom of everybody's shoes, just in case the thing does stop turning.
But in space, once you get a donut spinning at the speed you desire, Newton says it will keep spinning at that speed indefinitely. So if the little propulsion rockets used to get it up to speed should fail, you have hours, maybe days to fix the rockets before friction slows the doughnut and the artificial gravity degrades to any noticeable degree.
It's FUN pretending I actually KNOW something about Artificial Gravity!
And I still don't understand why the International Space Station doesn't have an AG Carousel.
I'm thinking mostly about the large lakes of open water. If there was an indication that the Torus was going to stop spinning and that gravity was going to be in flux, there would have to be a way to drain the lakes quickly.
Also, gravity near the center would be different, so you'd have to be careful about jumping too high (no trampolines) and games involving balls...(no high baseball hits...it would keep on going!)
All this aside, I still want to be the first clergy in space.
NASA never returns my calls and always returns my letters unopened.
when i used to drive around during the CB radio era, my handle was Space Rabbi -- I fancied myself the first Rabbi in Outer Space.
Vleeptron has discussed the special problems, particularly of determing when the Sabbath begins, of trying to be a Jew in Space. (Israel sent one of its pilots for a ride on the Space Shuttle.)
Yeah, a funny kind of rain when the Stanford Torus starts to slow down ... raindrops falling upward from the surface of the ponds and lakes and streams.
NASA still keeps the Stanford Torus website up and devotes a few staffers to it. Sorta nice that SOMEBODY at NASA is paid to focus so far ahead into the future.
Oh oh oh! Space Rabbi! There's a whole lotta Mishnah about how Jews are going to determine when the Sabbath begins in space. Two schools of thought on this one (at least, of course) but the two I am remembering right now go something like this.
1. The Sabbath in Israel Theory. Jews on non-terrestrian time who want to observe the Sabbath should do it when Sundown, Friday, Earth-Time begins, and observe it for 24 earth-hours. This seems to be the preferred one, and the easiest to achieve, though, depending on how local time is established, may or may not be related to local time (such as on a space station.) This is an absolutist theory...Friday, Sundown, on earth, is a fixed time.
2. The Relative Time
It is assumed that at least in Space, for humans, earth time will be observed. So, depending on where you left from will determine when Sundown, Friday is. So, if you left from Johnson Space Center in Texas, you would observe the Sabbath beginning at Sundown, Friday, Central Standard (US) Time.
This does not solve the problem of 'work' Jews might have to do in space on the Sabbath, say, to keep the oxygen tanks working, etc...Rabbis are actually still arguing out what constitutes a violation of the Sabbath. Most agree that in the case of life-threatening emergencies, or things that absolutely must be done, permission is given to do them.
There are other theories, of course, but these seem to be the two that are the most prevalent. Of course, some Jews will observe one way, and some the other, and will never agree on when the Sabbath actually happens, and will spend the next several hundred years arguing about it. As well they should.
Oh...the third theory, for planetary Jews, would be the "local weekend" theory. Each planet's calendar would have some fixed starting point, relative to the starting point of this solar system's Sun. Each calendar then is divided up into 'months', 'weeks', 'days' and 'hours' (and the smaller divisions of time as we understand it, of course...they may have different names on different planets).
at the end of every 'week' would be set aside one full 'day' of Sabbath. This one is trickiest because the further out you get from the sun in this solar system, the longer the weeks and days get.
For Mars, see here.
http://www.12x30.net/martian.html
Ahhh, pardon me, but - once the torus is set spinning, inertia sustains that motion, yes? What you must worry about is what massive thing/stuff or equivalent energy must have intervened to effect the stop. Unless the force was weak but sustained over time, we must be talking about a nasty impact. Such an event sufficient to stop the Torus would probably destroy it also.
Okay. I got no gripe with all that.
But ... Real Space Things -- actual human life and activity in Earth orbit aboard the Shuttle, Mir, the ISS, as well as the Apollo missions -- well, they're just much more complicated and filled with far more unexpected things -- hazards, annoyances, bio-challenges -- than it all looked in those 1950s Disney TV intros to Our Future In Space.
As anti-Romantic as it sounds -- I usually get attacked for bringing this up -- human space travel is pretty much a scientific and economic failure compared to robotic space activity. I got a post here, probably James Van Allen's obit, but Van Allen, at the center of US space activity from before we got into space, was lifelong loudly opposed to human space activity as a huge junk-science waste of our limited space resources. The counter-argument is largely based on the warm and fuzzy sentimental feelings we get watching "Star Trek." In other words, the Fiction of Humaned Space is beautiful, the Facts of Humaned Space are, and probably will continue to be, an Embarrassment.
Still, I'd max out my Visa Card in a heartbeat to get a chance to spend a week in orbit. I'd murder cub scouts to get a seat on the first humaned mission to Mars.
But in my head, I'm rooting for the robots. They're cheap, they go farther, faster, longer, they don't even care if they never come back, they accomplish spectacular science, and if they blow up, nobody mourns, grieves or cares. The whole space program isn't set back for 3 years because a robot blew up.
This is exactly like a Halo from the video game "Halo". This is just a smaller scale.
Hiya Jamie --
Well, the Stanford Torus came decades before the video game. Trust me. And maybe will actually spin around in space with thousands of people decades after the video game.
Like, are you in high school? Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where they thunk up the Torus, is a really brilliant school, you should give it a look.
So, I do not really think this will work.
This cannot have effect in actual fact, that's what I consider.
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