Science fiction is showing the way and perhaps it will in the future be feasible - an asteroid that could be used as a space station.
The idea that asteroids could be used to mine raw materials has been around for a long time. In addition, after the raw materials have been mined, the selected asteroids can be internally used for living space. One would only have to set the asteroid in rotation around its own axis to generate an artificial gravity. Inside the rock, astronauts would be better protected from cosmic rays than on the surface.
It will certainly take several more years before raw materials will be mined on asteroids for the first time, but today there are already many realization and business models for mining in space. The ideas are not only to bring the mined raw materials to earth, but also to use them directly on the asteroid itself or to make them usable for longer space travel. Astrophysicists from the university of Vienna have now calculated whether such a space station on and inside an asteroid would be feasible at all.
The astrophysicists have made their example calculation with a hypotethic asteroid with a size of 500 by 390 meters. They wanted to calculate the forces caused by such an asteroid being artificially rotated. In addition it must be said that this size was not chosen arbitrarily. There are asteroids of this magnitude near the earth. In their study on arXiv, astrophysicists cite as examples asteroides, which orbits around the sun from one to 2.5 years. But the problem is that little is known about the composition of these rocks.
The scientists used an asteroid of silicate rock as a template for their calculations. A cavity of 200 by 300 meters was to be created in it. As an example of gravity, they took it as if it were on Mars because it would not be harmful to humans. The mars has about 38% of the gravity of the earth. To achieve this gravitational force, the asteroid would have to rotate about 2 - 3 times per minute around its own axis.
The calculations show that a space station within an asteroid would be feasible without the centrifugal forces creating stresses that break the asteroid. But since this is only theory, in order to know nothing about the exact composition of an asteroid as well as its inner structures, one would first have to send probes, which determine the composition of the asteroids.
