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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Here's my design for solving this problem.

Instead of sending one rocket, you send two. You link them with steel cables. Then you rotate them around to generate the required gravity.

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> Artificial gravity is provided to the crew on the way out to Mars by tethering off the burnt out Ares upper stage and spinning up at 1 rpm.

From

Mars Direct: A Simple, Robust, and Cost Effective Architecture for the Space Exploration Initiative, by Robert Zubrin, February 1991

DOI:10.2514/6.1991-329

Yep, see Netflix film Stowaway for example. Once we get Spacex Starship working, fit 2 of them with Hab modules in the nose. Launch them and connect together at the nose and spin at different rates for moon gravity (G/6) and Mars gravity G/3). Use steel cables to increase radius and reduce required spin rate.

A relatively cheap (for space) setup to get some good actual measurements.

The whole "space is big" thing applies here, you can keep those two bodies super far apart. I don't really see a good reason for that tbh but it's possible. Though if the mission depends on those two bodies traveling together, you better have tons of redundancy or some propulsion systems to recover in case the cable snaps.

Was really thinking of an earth orbiting laboratory setup with a radius of about 250m and rotation speeds of about 2-3 rpm. Need to model it when I have some time. Just to gain actual data on different gravities and durations. The starship has plenty of room for the habs to run experiments on plants and people. Each one has propulsion in case of a cable failure. You’re correct, the cable snapping would be big concern.

> Though if the mission depends on those two bodies traveling together

Nevermind together, if the cable snaps they won't be going to the original destination.

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