Artificial Gravity
The Soviet space station Mir was not designed with a mechanism for the creation of artificial gravity. The lack of gravity, as shown apparent by media clips of life on Mir, complicates even the smallest everyday tasks. It would appear that
Zero gravity
Zero gravity
[Courtesy of NASA]
before extensive colonization of a space station in Earth's orbit is to become a practical reality, technology would need to be developed to create an environment to which humans are the most accustomed. This environment which has an attractive force holding objects in place. This is true because, according to Newton's Law of Gravitational Force, it is not only impractical but also extremely impossible to design a space station massive enough to create its own gravitational force. Thus, alternative measures must be taken to develop an acceptable and reliable gravitational force on board an orbiting space station such as ISS. The question is how.

Centrifugal force can provide a solution to this problem. The space station will need to be designed with a rotating
A centrifuge
A centrifuge
[Courtesy of NASA]
chamber where the centrifugal force will provide a force which will hold all objects in the room to the floor of the station. The centrifugal nature of the force is distinctly different from gravitational force yet it produces the same end result which mimics gravity. Thus we call this force artificial gravity. Now that artificial gravity has been authenticated, it is now pondered of how much centrifugal force is required to create an artificial gravitational force most comparable to that of the Earth's, or what we perceive as "normal."

Once artificial gravity is created on the space station, the environment will become very similar to that of the inside of a building on planet Earth. Even more, the promises of artificial gravity will make it possible to walk around the space station without one having the realization that one is in orbit.

Not only is there the question of how to create such a centrifugal force or how much centrifugal force is required, there is also the question of how the human body will react to such a force for such an extended period of time. Medical researchers and scientists have conducted many experiments to see if any effects will emerge. One of these experiments centered solely on the study of how the human blood pressure would react. In Mountain View California scientists used tree-climbing snakes due to their similarities to a human's blood vessels and blood pressure and put them into a different gravitational forces including a centrifuge. They found that the snakes developed different mechanisms, including differences in blood pressure, position of the heart, muscle tone and size, to maintain blood flow of blood to the head and rest of the body.

Using the data from the other experiments scientists have seen the more serious effects on the human body including cardiovascular deconditioning, orthostatic intolerance, muscular atrophy, and skeleton demineralization. Medical doctors, however, concluded that an increase in exercise, extra dietary calcium, and other pharmaceuticals will greatly prevent these types from occurring mostly in short, but possibly in long-duration missions.