Von Braun Class Station

Keep in mind though even .1 G (or less?) still gets you a lot of the benefits of gravity. Normal toilets, showers, dining, cooking, etc.

Nobody knows what effects long-term exposure to low, but not zero, gravity will have, but assuming that it is substantially better than microgravity, stations with rotational gravity of somewhere in the 1-5m/s2 seem like they may offer benefits with substantially lower engineering challenges.

An inflatable habitat could hold a small-ish centrifuge enough for some tests and to provide some semblance of gravity for sleep and exercise. If it gets really bad, the centrifuge can be dismantled and its remains used as divisions for what would be a very large empty space.

Tethering two Dragons together would be complicated and maybe require an EVA to attach the tether. The trunk remains attached during a launch abort, so it can survive 1g without flying away (the Dragons will need it for deorbit after the experiment). I'm also guessing they'd need some redesign, because you don't want to mess with the parachute fixation points and, even if you did, the "floor" of the capsule should, for this exercise, be perpendicular to the acceleration.

In short, I guess we need sci-fi grade engines that can pull 1g for weeks at a time.

I think you’d want to do experiments with two equally weighted pods on each end of a “salt and pepper” (see https://youtu.be/U-a_gtcftZg) type setup.

I hope to see tests in space as well. There’s likely some sweet spot that strikes a good balance between mitigating sickness, providing enough gravity to be useful, and being a reasonable size, and I think testing different configurations with a minimal rig where you change the diameter and rotational speed is the only way to discover it.

I might be wrong though. There might be compelling evidence there is no such sweet spot and that looking for one would be a waste of time.

It also took ~30,000 potatoes to make the alcohol fuel for each rocket, while German food supplies were running low during the last winter of the war [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket

Lots of better names are available:

"Originally proposed by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1903, the idea was expanded by Herman Potočnik in 1929."

"His employer of the time" is doing a lot of work for voluntarily joining the Nazi party, later misrepresenting that fact, voluntarily joining the SS, getting promoted a bunch of times, and regularly wearing his SS uniform to work.

Lots of terrible people have accomplished great and useful things. Good for them! I'm not taking that away from them. Just leave them & their names in the past where they belong. This is standard practice in medicine, a field with its own share of past nazis.

> zero attention to his ideals and life legacy.

the one's ideals and legacy are worth less than nothing if it is built, with the one's full awareness and willful participation, by concentration camp slaves dying in droves from malnutrition, physical abuse and the hard labor while building those ideals and legacy.

> employer of the time

that defense line of "i was just carrying out the orders" was explicitly addressed at the Nuremberg trials.

NASA should be removing Von Braun's bust from in front of their Huntsville center, not publishing apologia and hagiography on their website.

For those who don't know, this is from a very cutting song by Tom Lehrer: https://youtu.be/TjDEsGZLbio

> There are probably still people alive today that had a parent that died in slave labor at Mittelwerk building his rockets.

My grandfather, who is still alive, was a slave laborer there before he was liberated by the American army. His descriptions of the place are pretty horrific.

There's a difference between supporting nazism and choosing to honor a nazi, sure, but we shouldn't do either.

Many other fields have this same problem with terrible people making foundational contributions. The usual compromise is to rename phenomena that were named after them, not name any new things after them, and let their name drift into history. The history of the field is there for anyone who wants it, but it is just that - history. They are not venerated going forward.

If you want to make the case that this field should be forced to bear von Braun's name as a stain, I guess that's a somewhat interesting idea but I think it would have the effect of improving von Braun's legacy rather than forcing spaceflight to reckon with its past.