Rotating wheel space station

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A NASA engineer takes a walk-in simulated zero gravity around a mock-up of a full-scale, 24-foot-diameter space station in 1964.

A rotating wheel space station is a hypothetical wheel-shaped space station that could create artificial gravity by rotating. If the station were rotated at the correct speed, centrifugal force would cause objects to gravitate toward the outer rim of the 'wheel'.

Both scientists and science fiction writers have thought about this concept since the beginning of the 20th Century. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky wrote about using rotation to create an artificial gravity in space in 1903. Hermann Noordung introduced a spinning wheel station with a 30 meter diameter in his Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums (The Problem of Space Flight). He even suggested it be placed in a geostationary orbit. In the 1950s, Wernher von Braun, writing in Colliers Magazine, updated the idea, in part as a way to stage spacecraft headed for Mars. He envisioned a rotating wheel with a diameter of 76 meters. In 1959, a NASA committee opined that a such a space station was the next logical step after the Mercury program.^[1] The Stanford torus, proposed by NASA in 1975, is an enormous version of the same concept, that could harbor an entire city.

NASA has never attempted to build a rotating wheel space station, for several reasons. First, such a station would be very difficult to construct, given the limited lifting capability available to the United States and other spacefaring nations. Assembling such a station and pressurizing it would present formidable obstacles, which, though not beyond NASA's technical capability, would be beyond available budgets. Second, NASA considers its present space station, the ISS, to be valuable as a zero gravity laboratory, and its current microgravity environment was a conscious choice.^[2]

A famous fictional space station of this kind is Space Station V, which appears in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.