Sunday webinar on artificial gravity via rotation with tethers

On Sunday May 25th,  The Space Show will present a special video webinar program on the topic of using rotation to provide artificial gravity. Joe Carroll will discuss his ideas on using tethers for such rotating systems.

WEBINAR: The Sunday, May 25, 2014 program from 1-3 PM PDT, (4-6 PM EDT, 3-5 PM CDT): This is our first WEBINAR for 2014. Our guest of honor is Joe Carroll and I will be assisted on the panel with Dr. John Jurist and Dr. Jim Logan. Joe is updating us on his partial gravity work which was the topic of an earlier webinar in May 2011. You can listen to the audio only for this show as you would any Space Show program. If you want to see the live webinar, go to our private UStream Space Show channel, www.ustream.tv/channel/the-space-show. Note that this show will archive audio and video simultaneously. The video of our webinar will be on our private Space Show Vimeo channel. Watch for details.

Joe Carroll has worked since 1981 on advanced space transportation, mostly involving long tethers. He led the development of the Small Expendable Deployment System (SEDS), which demonstrated controlled deorbit without rockets in 1993 and also flew successfully on SEDS-2 in 1994, and TiPS in 1996. He also developed the deployer and wire for the Plasma Motor Generator (PMG), which demonstrated electrodynamic thrust in orbit.  He has also worked on unmanned and manned reentry vehicle concepts for NASA and several startups. His main current work is on electrodynamic tethers.

Here is a paper by Carroll : Design Concepts for a Manned Artificial Gravity Research Facility, by Joseph A Carroll, Tether Applications, Inc., USA (pdf).

[ Update: Some additional material has been made available for the show:

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Here are articles from Robert Walker who examines Carroll’s tether concept. Walker includes several animations showing how a crew capsule and its spent upper stage could be tethered together to provide a spin gravity system at low cost:

Here, for example, is an animation of a Soyuz spacecraft that is tethered to its upper stage.

For lunar gravity level:

Joe Caroll suggests a 600 meter tether. The final stage weighs a third of the weight of the Soyuz. This puts the centre of gravity of the assembly 150 meters away from the Soyuz, and 450 meters away from the final stage. 

This lets you generate artificial lunar gravity with spin rate of 1 rpm.

At that rotation rate the Soyuz has delta v of 15.6 m/sec, the final stage travels at three times that speed, and the speed of the Soyuz relative to the final stage is four times that, 62.4 m/sec.