Weightlessness, the feeling when you are in space and can float and fly around like Iron Man, can be pretty exciting, but it’s not as good for your body as you think. On earth, there is an average of a whopping 15 pounds of air pressure above you, so even if you don’t get a lot of exercise, you workout more than you think, because your body is fighting those 15 lbs of air pressure. In space, there is no air, so there can’t be air pressure. This means that if you are working out for an hour a day, the workout wouldn’t be as good as if you were on Earth.
Until now, the only way to fix this would be to exercise for 3-4 hours per day, but that would be very time-consuming, and it would leave little to no time for crucial activities like space walks. If you don’t work out, your bones will slowly decay away and you won’t be fit. This could even lead to something as major as collapsing during reentry due to the sudden and unexpected for after not having to work for such a long time.
We, the BrickMasters have a solution for this serious problem. If you could simulate earth-like gravity in space, then astronauts wouldn't feel the negative effects that they normally would.
How do you simulate gravity?! you may ask, and here is our answer:
The same way earth creates it's own gravity! The formula is:
Force=mass*velocity sq./radius
Earth's gravity is created by a HUGE object spinning. If the earth wasn't rotating, then there would be nothing pulling you to the earth, and you would go flying out in to space. The faster the earth is spinning(even though it maintains a constant speed), the stronger the force will be. So if something the size of earth was rotating 2000 miles per hour (3200 km/hr), or twice as fast as the earth, you would have to consciously work twice as hard to stand up.
Another driving factor is the radius of the spinning object. The larger the rotating object, again the stronger the force will be.
This way, we can make an artificial, but instead of pulling inwards, it will be pushing outwards. That is called centrifugal force. So technically, the astronaut will be standing on the ceiling, as shown in our model. There, there outward force will be the same as the Earth's inward force by making the radius 25 metres and spin it at 6 revolutions per minute(rpm).
Here is the link to the slo-mo video on Youtube of the astronaut being pushed outwards and standing on the ceiling:
(Post video on Youtube and then make it a link and then maybe delete this?)
Here is a link to the lines for the skit we did for the project this time: