A strange new study suggests living inside asteroids

Scientists have proposed what may be the most outlandish concept yet for colonizing space – living inside asteroids.

In a new paper, University of Rochester experts suggest dumping an asteroid, increasing its spin, to create artificial gravity, and filling it with buildings.

Covering the chosen asteroid in a flexible mesh bag made of carbon nanofibers, they say, will stop the cumulus from collapsing as it orbits.

The team admits that their concept is “largely theoretical” and that it would require “engineering capabilities that don’t exist at the moment.”

“Our paper lives on the edge of science and science fiction,” said study author Adam Frank of the University of Rochester.

We’re taking a sci-fi idea that’s been very popular lately – in TV shows like Amazon’s The Expanse – and offering a new path to using an asteroid to build a city in space.

“Based on our calculations, an asteroid 300 meters in diameter a few football fields across could be expanded into a cylindrical-shaped area of ​​about 22 square miles — roughly the size of Manhattan.”

The team took inspiration from the O’Neill cylinders, a concept for a space settlement proposed by American physicist Gerard K. O’Neill in 1976.

Spinning space cities consist of two connected cylinders rotating in opposite directions.

The cylinders would rotate fast enough to provide artificial gravity on their inner surface but slow enough that the people living in them would not experience motion sickness.

Billionaires Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who own Blue Origin and SpaceX respectively, have referenced O’Neill cylinders in their vision of future space habitats.

But the Rochester team says getting the building supplies needed from Earth into space to build these materials would be very difficult and expensive.

“Our proposal is likely to be less costly and engineering-wise than building a classic O’Neill habitat,” they say in their paper.

So they turned into asteroids – rocky bodies orbiting the sun, leftovers from the formation of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago.

Scientists estimate that there are about 1,000 asteroids larger than a mile across in our solar system alone.

A 2019 study led by Thomas Mindl at the University of Vienna suggested that a hollow asteroid with a central cylindrical cavity could rotate on its axis to achieve artificial gravity similar to Earth’s.

But this paper did not take into account a potential problem: that the asteroids’ hollow rocks would not be strong enough, so they would crack and disintegrate as they orbited.

Most asteroids aren’t even solid rocks, but rather “rubble piles” — collections of loose rocks, stones, and sand held together by the weak mutual gravity of space.

So the new study proposes covering an asteroid in a flexible mesh bag made of lightweight, high-strength carbon nanofibers — tubes made of carbon, each just a few atoms in diameter.

The bag would encase and support the entire spinning mass of the asteroid debris and habitat within it, while also supporting its own weight as it rotated.

Covering the carbon nanofibers will be solar panels, which will power the habitat.

Experts say the asteroid’s outer layer will provide a natural shield against deadly cosmic radiation from the sun.

Furthermore, a habitat built on an asteroid has implications for interplanetary transport – meaning that an asteroid colonizer could act as a spaceport.

Frank told MailOnline that the asteroid’s orbit will be rotated to create artificial gravity using rockets.

“The asteroid can be rolled by installing rocket engines in the bulk of the rubble pile and firing them perpendicular to the surface,” he said.

The team has not identified a suitable asteroid, though the project has been referred to as “Home Bennu” after the asteroid about a third of a mile wide.

Colonizing parts of space and making them habitable may be the only way to save humans from eventual extinction on our planet.

At some point in the future, humans could corrupt the Earth beyond repair by plundering its entire resources, or set it on fire through greenhouse gas emissions.

“If humanity really wants to become a space-faring species, it must have places to live and work,” the experts say in their paper published in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy & Space Science.

While our study clearly relies on engineering capabilities that do not currently exist, our results indicate that the underlying physics for turning small asteroids into human habitats is possible.

SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, is working on the Starship launch vehicle that would once take humans to the Moon and Mars and colonize them.

Musk’s entertaining 2017 paper, “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species,” outlines his company’s vision for living on Mars.

“History will split in two directions,” Musk says in the paper.

“One way is that we stay on Earth forever, and then there will eventually be an extinction event.

“The alternative is to become a space-bearing civilization and a multi-planetary species, and I hope you’ll agree that’s the right way to go.”

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