Rochester University scientists use physics and engineering principles to show how asteroids could be future viable space habitats.
This past year, Jeff Bezos launched himself into space, while Elon Musk funded a space flight for a non-astronaut crew. Space collaborations between government and private entities, including Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin have become increasingly common. But with the recent emergence of the so-called “New Space” movement, aerospace companies are working to develop low-cost access to space for everyone, not only billionaires.
For a future beyond Earth, however, humans need places to accommodate homes, buildings, and other structures for millions of people to live and work.
Right now space cities exist only in science fiction. But are space cities feasible in reality? And, if so, how?
According to new research from University of Rochester scientists, our future may lie in asteroids (https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fspas.2021.645363/full).
In what they deem a “wildly theoretical” paper published in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, the researchers, outline a plan for creating large cities on asteroids.
In 1972 NASA commissioned physicist Gerard O’Neill to design a space habitat that could feasibly allow humans to live in space. O’Neill and his colleagues worked out a plan for “O’Neill cylinders,” spinning space metropolises consisting of two cylinders rotating in opposite directions, with a rod connecting the cylinders at each end. The cylinders would rotate fast enough to provide artificial gravity on their inner surface but slow enough that people living in them would not experience motion sickness.
Since then, TV shows and movies including Star Trek and books such as Orson Scott Card’s 1985 novel Ender’s Game have depicted O’Neill cylinder-like habitats populated with human beings. Both Bezos and Musk have referenced O’Neill cylinders in their visions for future space habitats.
However, while O’Neill cylinders offer a solution to space’s lack of gravity, getting the necessary building supplies from Earth to space to create the O’Neill cylinders would be difficult and cost prohibitive.
Asteroids are rocky bodies orbiting the sun, leftover from the formation of the solar system approximately 4.6 billion years ago. Scientists estimate there are about 1,000 asteroids larger than one mile across traveling in our solar system.
But asteroids have several major drawbacks, the researchers found: the rock that comprises asteroids is not strong enough to handle getting even one-third of Earth’s gravity from spinning. Once an asteroid was set into rotation, it would merely fracture and break. Moreover, most asteroids are not even solid rock but “rubble piles”—clusters of loose boulders, stones, and sand held together by the weak mutual gravity of space. If the researchers wanted to make space habitats out of these asteroids, they’d have to figure out how to work with rubble piles.
The researchers imagine covering an asteroid in a flexible, mesh bag made of ultralight and high-strength carbon nanofibers—tubes made of carbon, each just a few atoms in diameter. The bag would envelope and support the entire spinning mass of the asteroid’s rubble and the habitat within, while also supporting its own weight as it spins.
Everything the researchers imagine in their study—from the motors needed to spin up the asteroid, to the carbon-nanofiber bag—are technologies people are currently either using or developing.
Pictures & Captions: https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/cities-on-asteroids-it-could-work-in-theory-543862/
AR #52
Perfect Lunar Base
