Artificial gravity.
Star Wars has it.
Star Trek has it.
Guardians of the Galaxy has it.
That is true.
But here's us.
Sometimes the water gets away from you.
Okay, I want tortilla. Got away.
Yeah these are all science fiction movies,
but is artificial gravity even possible?
Let's see. I'm Patrick Jones and this is Cheddar Explores.
I'm at the Intrepid Air and Space Museum
here in New York City standing in front of the space shuttle Enterprise.
Enterprise was the orbiter prototype that led to the shuttle program.
Of course, the shuttles didn't have gravity,
and former astronaut Mike Massimino knows
the effects of that on the human body first hand.
So, your spine grows a bit and you feel a little discomfort when that happens,
it usually happens like your first night you feel it.
Zero gravity it tends to pool in the upper extremities,
and in the head actually kind of like a head cold feel.
Do a flip for your family and friends. Can you do that?
Slowly.
Going upside down for the first time when I was in space.
From a body position, I felt like I was still straight up and down,
but that the whole room had rotated 180 degrees which was really troubling.
Yeah, I didn't like it at all.
I quickly turned myself right-side up.
But after a couple days,
I was able to be having my feet on the ceiling
and having a conversation and it didn't matter.
However, Mike shared that your brain adapts relatively quickly,
making you feel comfortable in the new environment.
But there's a catch.
The longer you spend,
the more you're going to adapt when you get there.
So, you're going to feel more and more comfortable overtime up there.
I think as you come back,
it's going to take a longer time to get used to it again.
We saw that with astronaut Scott Kelly who recently spent a year in space.
When he got back, he suffered from muscle degradation and bone mass loss,
making it difficult to move on Earth for some time.
Struggling to move upon landing would be
a major hurdle for studying other planets like Mars.
Now, knowing the benefit of artificial gravity,
can we do it? Scientists say maybe.
If we were to create it,
our design might look closest to the spacecraft from 2001, A Space Odyssey.
Space Station Five is composed of these spinning rings.
They create centrifugal force that pushes people toward
the outer edges of the craft giving them a floor to walk on.
If you've ever ridden the gravitron,
you've experienced what we're talking about here.
But even Stanley Kubrick didn't get it quite right.
That's because the circle was just not big enough.
Those circles would need to be larger and spin
faster to create an experience that would resemble Earth's gravity,
and that's the problem.
It would need to be massive.
If you built it on Earth,
the craft would have a hard time reaching the escape velocity
necessary to get it off the planet in one piece,
and if you build it in space,
well have you seen the price tag of the space station?
Even still, the artificial gravity created by
a spinning ship wouldn't recreate an environment like we have here on Earth.
That's because centrifugal force is not the same as gravity.
On Earth we enjoy a gravitational field created by its mass.
Gravity is relatively uniform depending on altitudes.
For example, the gravity at sea level in Bombay is about the same as Miami.
Centrifugal force on the other hand,
pushes matter away from the center axis.
So, it's not consistent.
The closer you are to the center,
the closer you are to weightlessness.
The closer you are to the edge,
the more weight you'd feel.
So, it would never feel quite like home.
The other option is to create a spacecraft big enough to create its own gravity field.
We are going to be setting for that small moon.
That's no moon, it's a space station.
.Just don't give it an easy flop, so it explodes.