Thursday, May 30, 2024

Inhabiting the large rock

To make a home in space you need shielding and gravity. Rubble-piles are pretty-well handled; they might even be better than classic spin-habs built from imported material. How about solid rocks?

What a hollowed stone mass buys us, is a shielded hangar as can hold incoming and outgoing craft. Also its outer shield is solid rock, not a net with some cables (so the gravel on the outside surface stays on there). It doesn't spin (as much) so panels and sensors can be better-attached to the outside. Some solid rocks are differentiates, like 16 Psyche, which means GOLD.

Why even have people in there? the shipyard will want workers with decent bone-structure that don't need called-in from some other rock. It will above-all need a medical station, which is only had with gravity. I'm designing for safety, redundancy, and repairability.

Our constraint is the tensile strength of solid (so irregular) S-type silicates, or the larger Vestoids. That matters less the further down the surface you dig. So: let's dig Deimos.

Deimos proper is 6.27 km radius. Surface gravity is 3 mm/s2 "milligravity" - hold onto that. Herein we can hollow a torus 1 km-radius, 6.283 km circumference; with plenty solid rock above us to spare. For a tenth that: take any irregular rock up to 627m, so let's say 200m radius = 1257m circumference. I'll work on those maths some other time.

What we do with 1.257km of track is run a maglev in it. The track runs cars at a speed to ensure like 9.8 m/s2. For our Venereal visitors, 8.7 and so on. It will need extra speed to counteract the milligravity of the hard centripetal "ceiling" (= gravitational actual core) where we keep one, but our first track especially can likely neglect this.

Best is that the track be superconductive, for the bonus of hoisting a magnet to keep incoming ions off the rock's surface. The interior of the torus is near-airless anyway. We'll have regular vents to ensure that.

INTERJECT 6/2: For comparative-engineering against Earth, our fastest train is the Shanghai. We'll get to the speed maths on Sunday. As far as human capacity goes, Google AI says: The Shanghai Maglev train is 153 meters (502 ft 0 in) long, 3.7 meters (12 ft 2 in) wide, and 4.2 meters (13 ft 9 in) high. It can accommodate 574 passengers in three classes. Oh goody: this will physically fit in my 200m radius, 1257m circumference tube. We can cut the "passengers" to, oh, a hundred per tube/train. Some get personal cabins, others get bunks; but most cabins are med-stations, offices, laboratories.

For balance and redundancy each torus should be in pairs: for each car-set going one way in one torus, an equal car-set goes the other on the other.

Each car is designed to travel in either direction. At regular intervals - I suggest a multiple of the Earth or Martian day of 24-25 hours - the first car of each car-set offloads and slows between the... toro [dual]. This allows regular communication and trade between the twain.

It also allows work on the body of the rock itself, and shuttles to the rest of the solar-system. Agriculture and industry can be done on the outer crust of the rock in its milligravity, remotely where possible.

Even those [6/2: hundreds] in an Eros-sized rock be mostly transient. But it may well be able to call in spare headcount from close by. Deimos has 1.51e+15 kg mass; Jensen figured Atíra for 4.11e+13. Atíra has a companion. In the scales we're talking, we can park a rubble-pile in orbit around the main rock. Or just a Janhunen dumbbell.

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