Among the many risks astronauts face during long-haul spaceflight, an extended stay in microgravity is one of the most consequential for long-term health, with effects on vision, bones, muscles and many other aspects of the body.
One solution might be artificial gravity — some way to create forces similar to Earth's gravity on a spaceship, akin to the giant rotating ring from Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey."
But is that technology ever coming, or will it remain science fiction?
"There's really no reason it couldn't happen," Torin Clark, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Live Science. "From a technical perspective, this is something that could happen in the very near future."
In fact, artificial gravity has almost made its way to space before. The Centrifuge Accommodation Module was a planned 8.2-foot-wide (2.5 meters) centrifuge for the International Space Station (ISS), but t...
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