In case you mean that you still follow a curved path if you jump up, I think you are wrong. Mass does not follow a curved path without centripetal force. As soon as you jump up, you are actually weightless again until you hit the ground which forces you to follow the curved path of rotation. Depending on your jump, and the size and shape of the station, you might even hit the ceiling first and lose control, maybe like a cat in washing machine :lol:
You're still spinning with the centrifuge, you are not stationary. As jedidia said, you will eventually fall to the floor.
And cats in washing machines? That's cruel... :uhh:
And the smaller the station, the smaller the comfort due to high rotaion, if you want to maintain 1g. If it is only 10 meters in diameter, which already is a lot, you won't feel fine anymore. Even 100 meters of diameter will be still pretty uncomfortable.
At 5 meters in radius
(to produce 1 g) the angular velocity will probably be too much to bear. At 50 meters, you get a little overr 4 rpm. Which some studies suggest is livable (although one would need some time to acclimatise), especially if your crew is unsusceptible to motion sickness.
You can also reduce the amount of centripetal acceleration. While there may be some degeneration in the crew, it would certainly be better than months or years in zero g. Ongoing research is needed to study the effects of partial G in humans.
A feather even more, and a human body certainly less
With the speed of the centrifuge you calculated, I think a human would be pushed along by the wind quite well.
Now, the air inside would have to be synchronised with the centrifuge. Which would inevitably happen from friction with the inside, although thin baffles (made of thin plastic, say) could help this along. If you are spinning a module instead of a ring, the air will have nowhere to go but be pushed by the wall behind it.
I don't think that something like ion drives are the answer to introduce a rotation of a station which consitst of thousands of tons of mass. Also, the station doesn't only has to rotate, it should also leave earth orbit to begin its journey
Why can't a propulsion system such as an ion drive or an arcjet have this capability? They may be low thrust, but long burn times can be dealt with.
Such a spinning spacecraft also does not need to be thousands of tons in mass. A simple centrifuge made of, say, two TransHab modules connected by a pretty fancy pressurised tunnel, might mass less than 80 tons (excluding things like radiation shielding, which will also push up structural mass). Two modules swinging around each other (or a module swinging around a common axis with the drive portion of the spacecraft) on a tether would probably mass much less, and could have a larger radius (lower angular velocity), though you will not be able to transfer to the other module through a tether...
A system bound by a tether also has to be robust, and so certainly won't be "very light" anymore.
Structures in tension can be lighter than structures in compression. Many heavy objects are often suspended by cables.
The cable could be made out of some sort of aramid, perhaps. Or even carbon fibre. There would have to be electrical connections through the cable for communications and power, but these need not be prohibitively massive.
The "spinning on a string" concept has been tested on a Gemini flight, although the angular velocity was not high enough to create noticable gravity.
Which is why I wrote that we have to revolutionize our propulsion technologies. If we manage to reach Mars within 2-3 weeks, the crew will be just fine. No rotatinal pipe dream required. But traveling to Mars within 2-3 weeks also is a pipe dream because the next issue would be a tremendous acceleration. You want to do it slowly? Maybe this would increase the travel time already significantly...
See the study that is being done right now with things like VASIMR. You do not need high accelerations; VASIMR does Mars in perhaps around a month. It accelerates and decelerates slowly, but does so throughout the entire journey.
Higher accelerations might be needed for faster travel times, but this impacts on engine design, not whether the crew can handle it. It is not tremendous in terms of multiple Gs. Fusion propulsion may be an answer to high thrusts at high specific impulses, but it is pretty far off technologically. Even some forms of fission propulsion may be able to yield dramatically shortened travel times.
And in agreement with the theory of relativity, all observations do show that particles and information can't be faster than light.
Particles with a rest mass can't accelerate to (or beyond, obviously) c. But general relativity
does allow for
apparent FTL, such as wormholes.
Whether information as a whole can go FTL is the big question, because if not it rules out FTL altogether. Experimental evidence shows that quantum-non local connection for example has a speed several times that of light, but cannot be used for transmitting information unless used in conjunction with another communication system.
Erwin Schroedinger? He was pretty nasty to cats.
At least his cats were alive
and dead until you observed them...
