Artificial Gravity on Earth-Mars Flights Reconsidered: the Mars Quartet

Abstract

The well-known concept of rotating a spacecraft tethered to a counterweight in order to generate artificial gravity in interplanetary transit between Earth and Mars fails to meet the condition for stable rotation. The present author has himself unwittingly perpetuated the same design error. It is therefore necessary to reopen the question of whether artificial gravity can be provided on an astronaut mission to Mars which is subject to realistic mass constraints. An architecture is proposed which uses four spacecraft in flight together, here referred to as the Mars Quartet. It is hoped that this will prompt NASA not to exclude artificial gravity solutions from their Mars architecture studies currently in progress. The conclusions concerning the pyramid architecture of an overall space economy, addressed in an earlier paper, are found not to be affected.