Boffins creating spinning house stations with faux gravity to assist hunt for aliens

The rotat­ing craft that mimic con­di­tions on Earth will allow astronauts to travel deeper into the Solar Sys­tem, like in film 2001: A Space Odyssey

Boffins are creating spinning space stations with artificial gravity to help us hunt for aliens. The rotat­ing craft that mimic con­di­tions on Earth will allow astronauts to travel deeper into the Solar Sys­tem, like in film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And it will mean humans could live in space long term without being harmed by zero grav­ity, open­ing up mega mis­sions to Mars and bey­ond. Tom Shel­ley, from US firm Vast which is behind the project, said: “Arti­fi­cial grav­ity space sta­tions allow us to explore fur­ther and deeper into space.

“One of the prob­lems with the humans in space is they suf­fer bone loss and muscle loss because of the side effects of liv­ing in micro­grav­ity, but if you can cre­ate an arti­fi­cial grav­ity space sta­tion, you’re now liv­ing in the grav­ity envir­on­ment we’re in here.

“The­ory sug­gests that, there­fore, you can spend longer in space, and you can there­fore explore fur­ther and deeper into space.” He added: “We’re fun­da­ment­ally a ‘keep­ing humans alive’ busi­ness.”

Movie 2001: A Space Odyssey sees a mystery object uncovered on the Moon and a spacecraft manned by two humans and a supercomputer sent to Jupiter to find its origins.

Vast plans to launch its first space hab­it­a­tion mod­ule Haven-1 followed by a full space sta­tion by 2030. After that, it will start on its arti­fi­cial grav­ity sta­tion which is set to take at least a decade.

Jed McCaleb, founder of Vast, added: “It’s a little bit like the new Everest. It may be tick­ing some­body’s life to-do list, but we layer on top of that some sci­ence that is truly valu­able for life and health on Earth.”

Eggheads say when the space station turns, it cre­ates an out­ward force, push­ing astro­nauts towards the floor. And if done at the right speed it feels the same as plan­et­ary grav­ity.

Currently, astro­nauts on orbit­ing space sta­tions float as the space­craft is in con­stant free-fall around Earth. On deeper space mis­sions, zero grav­ity can cause bone and muscle loss, heart problems, immune sys­tem changes and vis­ion issues.

It comes after Rus­sian rocket firm Ener­gia revealed plans for a space base that would rotate five times a minute, cre­at­ing a force mim­ick­ing 50% of Earth’s grav­ity.