Jan 3, 2023 06:36 PM
https://www.freethink.com/space/asteroid-city
EXCERPT: . . . “Our paper lives on the edge of science and science fiction,” University of Rochester professor of physics and astronomy Adam Frank said. “We’re taking a science fiction idea that has been very popular recently — in TV shows like Amazon’s The Expanse — and offering a new path for using an asteroid to build a city in space.”
Such a moving metropolis is called an “O’Neill cylinder,” named for physicist Gerard O’Neill, who designed them at the bequest of NASA in the 1970s...
[...] One of the largest hurdles to creating O’Neill cylinders would be the sheer cost of their construction. Getting the building materials — and labor — from Earth to space would be exceedingly expensive.
A partial solution could be building an asteroid city, taking advantage of the rocky bodies already out there, building upon them, and then setting them spinning. “All those flying mountains whirling around the sun might provide a faster, cheaper, and more effective path to space cities,” Frank said. Their abundance and rock layer, which could protect from space radiation, further make an asteroid city an attractive candidate.
But the team found a problem with this plan too when they ran the math: the asteroids will break apart well before they hit the speeds needed to keep our feet on the ground. And on top of that, most asteroids are less “chunk of rock” than “loosely assembled pile of rocks.”
[...] By running the math on the various forces and material necessary for building an asteroid city with different techniques, they hit on a possible — albeit science-fantastical — solution.
Their answer, published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences (frontiers indeed!), is a giant bag... (MORE - missing details)
Space Cities Out Of Asteroids and Graphene Bags? Intriguing O'Neill Cylinder Study ... https://youtu.be/0_dm0xLtjnM
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/0_dm0xLtjnM
EXCERPT: . . . “Our paper lives on the edge of science and science fiction,” University of Rochester professor of physics and astronomy Adam Frank said. “We’re taking a science fiction idea that has been very popular recently — in TV shows like Amazon’s The Expanse — and offering a new path for using an asteroid to build a city in space.”
Such a moving metropolis is called an “O’Neill cylinder,” named for physicist Gerard O’Neill, who designed them at the bequest of NASA in the 1970s...
[...] One of the largest hurdles to creating O’Neill cylinders would be the sheer cost of their construction. Getting the building materials — and labor — from Earth to space would be exceedingly expensive.
A partial solution could be building an asteroid city, taking advantage of the rocky bodies already out there, building upon them, and then setting them spinning. “All those flying mountains whirling around the sun might provide a faster, cheaper, and more effective path to space cities,” Frank said. Their abundance and rock layer, which could protect from space radiation, further make an asteroid city an attractive candidate.
But the team found a problem with this plan too when they ran the math: the asteroids will break apart well before they hit the speeds needed to keep our feet on the ground. And on top of that, most asteroids are less “chunk of rock” than “loosely assembled pile of rocks.”
[...] By running the math on the various forces and material necessary for building an asteroid city with different techniques, they hit on a possible — albeit science-fantastical — solution.
Their answer, published in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences (frontiers indeed!), is a giant bag... (MORE - missing details)
Space Cities Out Of Asteroids and Graphene Bags? Intriguing O'Neill Cylinder Study ... https://youtu.be/0_dm0xLtjnM