Re:Everything About Mars Is the Worst (2017)
by gampleman on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @03:14AM
(#40643474)
Take a really long cable, put a suitable weighted asteroid on the other end, then spin the whole thing up. As long as the cable holds, you have a decent amount of centrifugal force without needing a particularly large habitat.
Re:Everything About Mars Is the Worst (2017)
by me_me_me on Tuesday June 11, 2024 @06:49AM
(#40644724)
I love the prospect :D
If cable holds you have gravity, if it fails you risk being slingshot into deep space
The usual design for these things have very low surface speeds, so you're not likely to go off into the deep even if it fails, as you're going to be pretty close to your prior combined orbit even without thrust, and the Δv needed to get back will be tiny.
But also, the forces are never more than the apparent gravity times the mass, so when someone does finally end up experiencing this, it will be part of a larger pattern of bad maintenance and/or engineering that likely has other things going wrong at the same time.
I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but generally it’s considered that the issue is more that if you’re standing on a spinning cylinder, you might have weird balance issues due to speed differences between head and feet. Also, you have to remember you don’t have gravity, so as you intuit, entry and exit are trickier.
Two broad ideas for entry/exit: do it at the center where the physical position is stable, then “spin up” some how, or alternately get up to external speed and lock on to something that you then elevator through the surface.