Inflatable Space Stations
a day ago
- #space-stations
- #artificial-gravity
- #space-exploration
- Artificial gravity is essential for long-term space habitation to prevent health issues like muscle atrophy, bone weakening, and eye problems.
- NASA had viable designs for rotating space stations in the 1960s, but the Apollo program shifted focus away from artificial gravity research.
- Early visionaries like Wernher von Braun advocated for rotating wheel space stations to simulate gravity, a concept dating back to the 1920s.
- Engineering challenges include the need for large structures to generate sufficient gravity and the difficulty of fitting them into slender rockets.
- Modular assembly methods, like those used for the ISS, limit the scale of space stations and make ambitious projects like the Stanford Torus impractical.
- Pre-Apollo NASA explored 'unitized' structures, including inflatable and rigid hexagonal stations, as alternatives to modular assembly.
- The Apollo Applications Program briefly revived space station research but was underfunded, leading to scaled-down projects like Skylab.
- Commercial companies like Vast are now revisiting artificial gravity stations, with plans for a 40-person rotating station by 2035.
- Inflatable habitats, like the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, offer potential solutions to volume constraints and have proven durable in space.
- Starship's payload capacity could enable the construction of large inflatable rotating stations, though material strength in such configurations remains untested.
- NASA's current focus on Mars and commercial partnerships could drive renewed interest in artificial gravity technologies.