Well, a new spin--and forgive me for a truly terrible and (I promise) unintentional pun--on the idea is picking up some steam in research circles. http://space.com/businesstechnology/tech... The idea is to maintain the spacecraft as a zero-gravity environment, but to have a smaller centrifuge within the ship--a sort of "gravity chamber" for workout purposes and so on. I remember reading this very idea from a work dated in the 1950's, in fact, coming from Krafft Ehricke, and if memory serves Wernher von Braun also tossed the possibility around in the design of his Mars flotilla in The Mars Project. Now it looks like we might actually be interested in seeing what we can make of it.
Trying to provide all or most of the pressurized environment aboard a spacecraft with artificial gravity requires a pretty hefty centrifuge, if one goes that route. Big means expensive--probably prohibitively so, when one considers that rotation rates probably need to be kept so low as to require truly vast spin radii. For Mars-normal gravity (0.38g) at a gentle 2 rpm, you need a radius of 86 meters. Folks, that centrifuge is almost two full football fields across! An alternative would be to simply have the pressurized part of the spacecraft at one end of a spin arm--for example, a tether--and a counterweight at the other, but now you run into questions of what non-mission-critical dead weight are you hauling at the other end of that tether?
The way to bring this centrifugal gravity back into the realm of the possible is to decrease the centrifuge radius by increasing the spin rate. At 6 rpm the Mars-normal centrifuge could get away with being 20 meters in diameter--still big, but better. At 10 rpm we only need a diameter of 7 meters. Ah, but now we've shrunk the thing so much and it's spinning so quickly that we're making all our astronauts sick.
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