The pull of artificial gravity
Although President Obama’s vision for NASA’s future calls for canceling the Constellation program that was intended to send humans to the moon by 2020, his proposed budget for the agency still holds opportunities for future space research and urges NASA to develop the technology to enable human spaceflight to locations like Mars that are beyond low-Earth orbit. Several MIT researchers have been intrigued by one item in the proposal that they hope Obama will elaborate on during today’s policy speech at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida: extending operations of the International Space Station (ISS) past its planned retirement in 2016.According to Obama’s proposal, keeping the ISS operational would allow NASA and other nations’ space agencies to deploy new research facilities there, such as a centrifuge, which simulates the effects of gravity by spinning. Equipping the space station with a centrifuge would give scientists a valuable opportunity to test whether...