Time To Get Serious About Gravity

A critical question regarding the settlement of space has been ignored for decades. When will we find out what partial gravity does to humans?

When the question of space colonisation arises, the impacts of long ISS flights on astronauts is sometimes raised as a criticism. The obvious problem with this is that nobody is proposing to colonise a weightless environment - all suggestions are for surface bases on the Moon/Mars or for rotating habitats in space that provide gravity. But, especially for the question of surface bases, the truth is that we do not know what the impacts would be. Gravity levels between Earth normal gravity and weightlessness have not been looked at in any significant way.

This cannot be studied on Earth for any length of time - parabolic flights can be used for very short bursts of low gravity, and this was used to train Apollo astronauts for lunar surface activities - but to study this for meaningful lengths of time we have to do so in space. We know what we need to do to create artificial gravity in space - rotate. The centrifugal force experienced by objects in a rotating reference frame can approxima…