Can you really climb the cable of the spinning ship on Stowaway?

Let’s make it simple: to obtain an artificial gravity of 0.5 g, you need a radius of 450 meters and a spacecraft-to-counterweight (900 meters) twice that distance.

Just for fun, The Wikipedia page lists the tether distance at 450 meters. This will produce a radius of rotation of 225 meters. Using the same angular velocity, the astronaut’s artificial gravity is only 0.25 g’s.

I mean, it’s not terrible. In fact, the gravitational field on Mars is 0.38 g’s, so this is almost enough for astronauts to prepare for work on Mars. But I will stick to the artificial gravity of 0.5 g’s and the rope length of 900 meters.

What will it look like when sliding down?

Without going into details, let us consider what to do if for some reason an astronaut intends to climb a cable from the spacecraft to the counterweight on the other side. Maybe life on the other side will be better, who knows?

When astronauts activate the cable (which I call “the direction opposite to artificial gravity”), physics indicates that they will feel the same apparent weight as other astronauts on the spacecraft. However, when they become taller on the cable, their circle radius (distance from the center of rotation) will decrease, thereby reducing artificial gravity. They will feel lighter until they reach the center of the tether, where they will feel weightless. As they continue to move to the other side, their apparent weight will begin to increase, but in the opposite direction, pulling them toward the counterweight at the other end of the tether.

But this is not very exciting for the movie. So here are some very compelling things. Suppose an astronaut starts to approach the center of rotation with very little artificial gravity.Instead of climbing down the tether slowly, let her leave only fake gravity Pull Is she down yet? How fast will she go when she reaches the end? (It’s like falling on the earth, except when she “falls”, gravity increases with the distance from the center. In other words, the farther she falls, the greater the force exerted on her .)

This becomes a more challenging problem because the force experienced by the astronaut changes when moving down. But don’t worry, there is a simple way to get a solution. It may seem like a liar, but it works. The key is to break down the action into a small amount of time.

If we consider her movement in a 0.01 second interval, then she will not move too far. This means that the artificial gravity is almost constant, because her circle radius is also approximately constant. However, if we assume that a constant force is maintained in a short time interval, we can use simpler kinematics equations to find the position and velocity of the astronaut after 0.01 second. Then, we use her new position to find new powers and repeat the whole process again. This method is called numerical calculation.

If you want to model the motion after 1 second, you need 100 of these 0.01 time intervals. You can do this calculation on paper, but it makes it easier for a computer program to perform this calculation. I will take a simple approach and use Python. You can see my code here, But this is what it looks like. (Note: I increased the size of the astronaut so that you can see her, and this animation runs at 10 times the speed.)

In order for the cable to slide down, it takes about 44 seconds for the astronaut to slide (in the direction of the cable) at a final speed of 44 meters per second (or 98 miles per hour).So this is Is not A safe thing.