• Question: How can we "create" gravity in spaceships?

    Asked by ZombieBomb to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 18 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Lidunka Vocadlo

      Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 18 Jun 2015:


      @ ZombieBomb I’m guessing something could be done with rotation or acceleration – but my fellow scientists will come up with something far more convincing!

    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 18 Jun 2015:


      I’d have to go with exactly what Lidunka has suggested!

      Gravity is a force pulling us downwards. On a spaceship, we’d need to somehow reproduce this. You could magnetise your feet to stick to the spaceship, but then only your feet will stick, so that’s not much good.

      The reason a lot of sci-fi ships are shaped like spinning rings is that anything spinning in a circle feels a force away from the centre. Think about attaching a small weight to a string and spinning it around your head – the weight strains against the string because it feels a force pushing it ‘outwards’.

      Now imagine a big, ring-shaped spaceship rotating around – if people were to walk inside the ring (with their head pointing towards the centre and their feet touching the ring), this force would pull them down onto one side of it just like gravity pulls us onto Earth. So that’s the easiest way to create artificial gravity on a spaceship!

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 19 Jun 2015:


      The easiest way is through rotation – if you spin something, there’s an apparent force that would pull things “down” towards the outside. The spaceships that don’t do that – I think Star Trek is guilty here – have some kind of magical “gravity generator”; that is entirely science fiction.

Comments