Sure, the idea of creating gravity sounds like something out of a science fiction book. In fact, the idea started out that way, in a novel. It is only recently that a man named Hermann Oberth found a way to actually make artificial gravity. He used something called centrifugal force, which is the force that tends to impel an object, in whole or in part, outward from a center of rotation. If that wordy definition is a bit confusing, just think of a bucket full of water. If you swing the bucket around and around fast enough, not a drop of water is lost! That’s because centrifugal force keeps the water inside the bucket, almost as if gravity is holding the water in place.
Believe it or not, systems which are designed to simulate gravity in space basically act like buckets swinging around and around. Picture a spaceship hub attached to a long tether, and on the other end of the tether is a counterweight. Out in space, you would have engines which would start the whole thing spinning. For the humans inside the spaceship hub, it would seem as if there was gravity pulling them to the floor! This whole system works in a similar fashon as the accelerating elevator described on What is Gravity? Page 6 except that it uses angular acceleration instead of normal posotive accleration.
