[PREV - HOHMANN_TRANSFER]    [TOP]

INSIDE_OUT_WORLDS

                                                        March 21, 2018

It's an old observation: in a rotating body
the outward centrifugal force can substitute       https://xkcd.com/123/
for the gravitational field we've evolved
to live in.  The old Willey Ley-style of
space station was a wheel shape, a spoked
wheel where people would reside inside the
tubular habitat around the wheel's rim.

In the 70s, a physicist named O'Neill
proposed building larger than that,
he envisioned gigantic cylinders large
enough to contain a baby biosphere,
illuminated by sunlight shining down the
cylinder's axis reflected by some mirrors
on the end.

O'Neill proposed building the first one
at one of the Lagrange points, L5 which
(like L4) is a stable position located
at the corner of an equilateral triangle                George O. Smith's
where the earth and sun occupy the other                "Venus Equilateral"
corners.                                                stories took place
                                                        in a station at a
     And I presume (but don't                           similar point in
     remember) that the idea was to                     Venus orbit.
     have the habitat's axis aligned
     parallel to the orbital axis of
     the earth, so the orientation
     of the mirrors wouldn't need to
     change throughout the year.




--------
[NEXT - PLATFORM_FOR_CHANGE]