Gravity on the Moon and Mars is 16.5 and 37.9 percent of Earth’s gravity. And the effects arising when people live in conditions of reduced gravity have long been known, such as degradation of muscle mass, thinning and loss of bone strength. Therefore, scientists are faced with the challenge of finding a suitable solution that will allow several generations of people to live normally on the surface of the Moon and Mars. And one attempt to solve this problem is a project developed by Japanese scientists, where a rotating structure is to be built on the surface, inside which artificial gravity is created, equal in strength to that of the Earth.
The space base project with artificial gravity was developed by scientists from Kyoto University together with specialists from Kajima Construction Co. Ltd. The first part of the project is a structure called Lunar Glass, which is an inverted cone with a height of 400 meters and a radius of 100 meters, rotating at a speed of three revolutions per minute. According to plans for the first simplified prototype Lunar Glass could be built by 2050, and the construction of a full version, capable of providing accommodation for several generations of people, will take at least a century.
The second part of the project is the Mars Glass structure, which, as the name implies, is a Martian base that looks a lot like a lunar base. And even more interestingly, all of this is just part of an ambitious space transportation system project that could connect Earth with other places in the solar system.
This system, the Hexagon Space Track System, will be able to provide research, business in space, and, of course, space tourism. Space Express spacecraft will be launched from Terra Station. When launched into space with the help of jet gas pedals, these ships, shaped like a hexagon with a diameter of 15 to 30 meters, will begin to rotate around an axis at a speed that provides gravity equal to the force of the Earth.
Finally, it should be noted that the Lunar Glass project is not the first project of this type. Back in 1975, researchers from Stanford University demonstrated a project called Stanford Torus, whose rotating structure is shaped like a torus, one mile in diameter, and can accommodate from 10 to 140 thousand people.
