Why does the ISS not have a stanford tourus-like module, where they would be able to have (partial) gravity? Were there ever any plans to add such a module in the past?
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The short answer is money and back when they were planning the ISS the thought was they could do microgravity experiments where you of course do not want gravity.
Building a rotating space station is expensive. It needs to be really big so that you aren’t spinning very quickly out at the rim. And more importantly you want your feet to be spinning at the same speed as your head. There’s a strange effect in small diameter spinning objects where the amount of “gravity” at the outside is much larger than the inside. Imagine if you were lying down flat on a spinning wheel that was about twice your height, so that your head was right in the middle. As the wheel begins spinning, your feet would feel the “gravity” but your head would feel nothing because it’s in the middle just rotating around a point. This has been tested on humans and it’s very uncomfortable and disorienting. It makes people dizzy and nauseated.
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