Artificial gravity breaks free from science fiction

For shame colorado.edu, eh? I got actually angry for a minute.

Headline breaks free from the gravitas of journalistic integrity

Hey, rotation works.

There was a NASA-funded NIAC proposal about using linear acceleration (oscillating up and down in an elevator) to do the same thing, but it's pretty strange compared to just using rotation.

Agreed. The title is misleading IMO. This isn't sci-fi, it's just a fancy amusement park ride. These things have been around for decades:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitron

Yeah, it'll likely be a central tube or slip ring of some kind. I think it's more likely that the entire spacecraft will be assembled in orbit and spun up there.

turbolift

You don't need to transition unless you want a microgravity lab or possibly docking another spacecraft. Stopping is also an option, though debris and even furniture might float around.

Picture a long truss connecting an office building to a nuclear reactor. It spins end over end. There are multiple ways to connect a non-rotating part at the middle.

One way involves an air lock. Pass through that, shut the door, and then adjust the relative rotation.

Another way involves a large and troublesome seal. I suspect this might best be done with ferrofluids to seal the gap.

Accepting a bit of air loss is another option. If the gap is tiny, it might not be bad. It would just be part of the accepted loss, just like the loss from spacewalks.

For docking, you could skip all that if you accept the complexity of docking with a spinning object. You could even dock away from the center if the rotation is slow enough.

I'm pretty annoyed that this article doesn't mention it, but the whole point of Prof. Clark's research is to find the human tolerance for rotation so that these structures can be made as small as possible. I suppose the news here is that his candidates made it to 17 rpm, which appears to be a new record.