Comments by "" (@timogul) on "Scott Manley"
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If I was going to colonize an asteroid like that, I would use a "worm coring" method. I would build a toroid spinning habitat on one end of it, providing an artificial gravity environment. Then I would use standard mining equipment to dig a massive tunnel straight through the center to the other side. This tunnel would be capped at both ends and linked to the existing station, but at first would be a zero-G environment. Then I would head to the middle of this tunnel, and slowly start to expand outwards, taking a cylindrical chunk out of the middle, big enough around to make another cylindrical habitat that could be spun up to comfortable gravity.
Once that's going, colonists would have two places to get in some gravity exercise, but still the tunnel would be zero-G. Then you just expand outward from the center, clearing more space and adding more spinning habitat until you have plenty of space for the people to spend most of their time in the gravity areas. Once you have most of the asteroid hollowed to this level, assuming there is more room to expand towards the surface, you do so, slowing down the spinning components and moving new housing into outer rings as necessary, until eventually the whole thing is mostly hollow. Since the spinning components would all be engineered for durability rather than natural, it shouldn't break up. The benefit to this over just building a giant O'Neill cylinder from scratch is that 1. you would be able to constantly mine the asteroid through the development process, making it a revenue-producer from day one rather than a complete money pit until mostly completed, and 2. the rocky shell should provide a strong defense against radiation and impacts, like coating an O'Neill cylinder with massive amounts of armor.
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I would like to see someone (most likely NASA), make a small scale "Bolo station." It would be one crew compartment that is maybe 3-5m cubed, then a long high tension line to a central pivot point, and then another long line out to either a second, equivalent facility, or just empty ballast, maybe a spent piece of space junk or whatever they can get a hold of. The point would be that it would be equally balanced across the center point, and then you would just spin the whole thing up so that the crew compartment would be spinning fast enough that it could provide 1G. Ideally the central area would have a "spool" of wire that it could play out in both directions, allowing the diameter of the system to be changed at will, and they could run basic human functionality testing at any combination of speed and distance. Could you get 1G at a diameter of 50m that people would be comfortable with? Would a 100m diameter be more comfortable? Would 0.5G be better? Or would 0.3G be "good enough" without causing any noticeable problems? You could test out all the possible combinations by adjusting the line and speeding up or slowing down the rotation, without having to build entire facilities for each test. The only tricks would be in having a strong enough wire that you could fully trust it at those stresses, and also making sure that both sides moved in perfect sync, otherwise it could wobble off course.
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