Posted on 12/22/2022 3:35:37 PM PST by BenLurkin
To create some gravity, you could hollow a decent-sized asteroid out...and spin it up like a ring-station, using centrifugal force to create that 0.3g. Then, you could build your city entirely within the spinning asteroid; sure, it'd be dark in there, but the rock would protect people from harmful space radiation. That might have a chance of working if the asteroid was made of solid rock with high tensile strength throughout.
The team looked into the composition of our local "flying mountains" and found that most are more or less giant piles of rubble, collections of big and small rocks held together weakly by their own mutual gravity. Hollow one of these things out and spin it up, and the "ground" you're trying to create inside the asteroid would just fling away into space and disappear.
A cylinder-shaped bag a fair bit bigger than the asteroid itself, made from a flexible, ultra-light, ultra-strong carbon nanofiber mesh. This, says lead author and Ph.D candidate Peter Miklavčič, "would be extremely light relative to the mass of the asteroid rubble and the habitat, yet strong enough to hold everything together. Even better, carbon nanotubes are being developed today, with much interest in scaling up their production for use in larger-scale applications.”
...the team concluded, turning asteroids inside out in nanofiber mesh bags does look like a feasible way of laying the foundations for a space city – and a much cheaper and simpler one, it would appear, than if you tried to launch all your materials from Earth. Mind you, you'd still need to launch the materials to populate this barren, rocky ring with buildings, life support systems, space pubs, and fences to stop people floating off into inky blackness after getting lost on the way home from the space pub.
(Excerpt) Read more at newatlas.com ...
Sounds like Sorter living.
Sounds like Resort living.
How can spelchk B so bad now that Jao is POTUS?
Sounds like they cribbed it from the Sci Fi novel ‘The Sparrow’!
Sounds like they cribbed it from the Sci Fi novel ‘The Sparrow’!
Or Eon by Greg Bear.
That one I’ve not read!
As the article notes, they are far too weak to work as a habitable structure even at 0.3 g. Which is too weak to keep people healthy and able to travel to normal-g environments anyway in the long run. Smelt them down and use the raw materials to build 1 g ring structures (2 km. minimum diameter to avoid making people sick from the rotation).
The OSIRUS-Rex mission collected a sample from asteroid Bennu; to do this it discharged a puff of nitrogen gas into the asteroid whilst in contact with the surface.
That puff of just a gram or two of gaseous nitrogen dislodged something like five cubic meters of Bennu, which eventually fell back onto the asteroid, so weak is its gravitational field.
It was so good I had to read the sequels.
Well ok then…
They did that to Ceres in “The Expanse” using cables to hold it together.
People simply have no clue how hard it will be to migrate into space. Air leakage, lack of gravity, lack of access to parts, cosmic radiation etc. Add the human capacity for stupidity and you are always on the brink of disaster with no space calvary coming to save the day. Yes we will get there. We are centuries away.
“We are centuries away.”
At least that long to get people to finally go after all the highly publicized disasters and horrible deaths that will occur trying to get out there. Space travel is nothing like air travel or anything close to what the pioneers dealt with getting across the continent in the 19th century. And then living out there is a whole other thing. Forget it.
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