Centripetal Vivarium Toroidal Space Stations

Definition

Vivarium: "Place artificially prepared for keeping animals in their natural state, zoological garden or the like."

Centripetal: "Tending towards centre."

Centripetal Vivarium: "Huge manufactured living spaces that can be spun on their axis to create a gravitational effect. CenViv for short. A CenViv is a type of toroidal space station."

Introduction

CenVivs can be much more than just zoological gardens though. They can be ideal, clean, self sustaining environments for people to live in.

Two views of the CenViv structure are shown here, the second is the end view you'd see if you were between the station and it's outer mirror (not shown in this illustration). The pinkish disk in the centre is the mirror, which reflects light 'down' onto the 'ground'. The area currently experiencing daylight is shown at the bottom of the picture, anybody in the lower right would be experiencing morning, lower left, afternoon. The top of the picture shows the area currently experiencing night.

Because the entire set of drums is spinning around the axis of your line of sight, everywhere on it's inside surface seems 'flat and horizontal' to whoever or whatever is inside it; the occupants always look 'up' to see the mirror (though if they look 'North or South' of the mirror they will mostly see stars, on both sides).

The sets of cylinders shown are the glass shield separating the environment from the vacuum of space, closest to the mirror. The next set of drums (it's actually two close together) represent the ground and sea floor surfaces and allow a 15 metre sea depth. The outer drum shown is the total size of the pressurised drum (with further rails, shielding, superstrucutre etc. outide that) but that's under review.

For further views of the CenViv, check out the 3d models.

Size

CenViv's need to be large to be practicable. NASA estimated the minimum size for a centripetal space station was 'half a mile' (800 Metres) to avoid dizziness. The international space station is built on a smaller scale and will not be of this type.

The sizes I'm considering, starting at a one minute rotation period, would dwarf the half mile limit though.

A 1 minute period Toroidal Space Station needs to have a Radius at 'ground' level of 894 Metres in order to provide a 1G environment. It's Circumference would be about 5.6 Km.

For a 1 minute CenViv the Depth is further locked in to around 970 Metres (depth extends back into the screen in the second picture).

This provides an effective surface area or living space of just under 550 hectares.

Materials

The resources needed to build a CenViv are immense. For example, one estimate put the amount of shielding required to keep people (and animals, plants etc.) safe from cosmic rays in free solar space at 500 tonnes per square meter. This design, which revolves through a complete circle once per minute, and has just under 550 hectares of space, may require an amount of rock, cement or steel of ...2 and 3/4 billion tonnes of shielding material alone. This figure doesn't account for the water, air, glass mirror and ceiling, and the rest of the biomatter and structural necessities, but it gives an idea of the scale.

Obviously we can't afford to go ripping this material out of our own tortured planet (6 billion warm blooded omnivores seem to be doing quite enough of that), and I feel we should leave the moon alone (it's a timer for corral spawning, a guidance system for insects, may have played a crucial role in the development of our own planet and doesn't provide all the materials we'd need anyway ...just to name the first four reasons I can think of not to sacrifice it to human greed). The rest of the solar system is a different matter though.

The first, most obvious candidate for mining is the asteroid belt, nowadays nothing more than a nuisance and irritation. If we could collect and use just 1% of the material of the asteroid belt, this would be enough to construct over 8 billion of the shields described and provide more than 85 times the entire surface area of the Earth!

Venus' atmosphere would be an excellent source of carbon and oxygen. Mars' moons Phobos and Deimos would probably be a good source of the lighter metallic elements. The asteroid belt contains many of the heavier elements. For the all important hydrogen, we might best try the moon's of Jupiter, by this stage in the solar system it is plentiful. (Yeh.. O.K. so we check the moon for life first).

Conclusion

While the resources needed to build CenViv's are huge, the potential material sources (the Solar System) are immense. We only need to adapt our engineering expertise to the deep space environment. We need to do this to survive as a species, I believe there are already too many human beings living on Earth for it to support us in a sustainable manner.

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