Rotating Wheel Space Station - History

History

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. Herman Potočnik introduced a spinning wheel station with a 30 meter diameter in his Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums (The Problem of Space Travel). He even suggested it be placed in a geostationary orbit.

In the 1950s, Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley, writing in Colliers Magazine, updated the idea, in part as a way to stage spacecraft headed for Mars. They envisioned a rotating wheel with a diameter of 76 meters (250 feet). The 3-deck wheel would revolve at 3 RPM to provide artificial one-third gravity. It was envisaged as having a crew of 80.

In 1959, a NASA committee opined that such a space station was the next logical step after the Mercury program. 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 the present space station, the ISS, to be valuable as a zero gravity laboratory, and its current microgravity environment was a conscious choice.