[garmaine]

Spin the spacecraft. Done.

[wyattpeak]

It works in principle, but it's a very big engineering task, and an enormous expense to boot. To avoid noticeably different acceleration between head and foot,* it's going to have to be substantially larger than any spacecraft we've ever built, and the biggest spacecraft we've ever built cost over $100bn. It's also going to have to withstand stresses larger than anything we've done before.

There's no reason to doubt we could do it, but it's a very big step from where we are now.

* And if we don't do that, then we stray into the realm of untested biological issues. We have no idea if people can live safely and comfortably like that.

[shkkmo]

Spinning a spacecraff is mostly hard because of the mass constraints, building a banked circular track on the moon should be much easier.

[garmaine]

It is literally two things connected by a rope. A tether-based spun spacecraft is trivial from an engineering perspective, and can have as large a radius as you need to avoid differential “gravity” effects.

[sbierwagen]

It is unknown if it will be that easy. For obvious reasons, there have been no long-term studies in partial gravity. If 0.05g stops bone loss, great. If a full 1.0g and nothing less is required, then that's going to be a really onerous design constraint.

[Qem]

I wonder if this unknown may, in the end, turn out to be a great reason to motivate space exploration. A full G is the norm on Earth. Micro-G in orbital stations have known long-term negative effects on health. What if fractional-G actually has beneficial effects, like say, increasing average human lifespan a lot. The human circulatory system tends to fail early, causing a disproportional amount of deaths due to strokes or heart failure. It's far-fetched speculation on my part, but is not hard to imagine operating in a fractional-G environment could decrease wear and tear here, acting as a sort of medical treatment. In the end, people would have a great motivation for leaving Earth. Just dodging death, the ultimate enemy of all living things.

[shagie]

If a full 1.0g is required, that also makes it a much more difficult challenge on the moon. Spinning a module of a space station in zero g is one thing... trying to get a portion of a moon lab at 0.16g to 1.0g is a different challenge.

[bumby]

I’m always leery of solutions to complex problems that take the tone of “all you’ve got to do is…”

[fragmede]

“There is a solution to every problem: simple, quick, and wrong.”