flight time
Cool. Glad Blue Origin are finding customers.
A shame the flight is quite so sub-orbital, as sustaining the gees comes for free once you have spun up. Wonder if a kind of hybrid suborbital spaceplane thingy might last longer.
Blue Origin has sent its reusable New Shepard rocket on another suborbital lob, this time simulating lunar gravity for capsule payloads. The rocket launched this week following delays due to thick clouds and vehicle avionics issues. Liftoff occurred at 1600 UTC, and the capsule reached 105 km above sea level before returning …
> sustaining the gees comes for free once you have spun up
Just so long as nothing runs around the spin equator for too long or too fast.
If you want to test a Lunar Rover's traction (not necessarily adult-human-sized Rover, might get crowded) then you need to make sure it reverses direction regularly (or you run two, one spinwards, one anti-spin).
Although, at 11 RPM, your Rover's are going to have to go slow to avoid affecting their effective weight too much.
Although Kola is 12km deep much of that is full of water. Towers are cheaper than holes. Fallturm delivers about 9 seconds of free fall, does not fill up with water but does need vacuum pumps. Aircraft can counter air resistance with a little thrust and score 25 seconds of weightlessness. New Shepard gets about 60km of unpowered flight which should last 220 seconds.
The jelly is still important, so the centrifuge doesn't break up when it lands.
Grading the jelly from thin and wobbly at the top to stiff and trifle-like at the bottom would help reduce the depth needed.
In fact it doesn't have to be a gee simulator for this to work. I have now patented the graded-jelly-filled shaft for all vertical landers.
You'll get lunar gravity at a precise distance from the axis ("at the midpoint of the crew capsule lockers"), but at every other distance it will be either lesser or greater than that. In such a small capsule the difference will be pretty noticeable, and the Coriolis force will probably also be apparent. So I suspect that this is only going to be useful for pretty small experiments.
Still pretty cool though :-)