Habitat Bennu

[msstice]

Habitat Bennu: Design Concepts for Spinning Habitats Constructed From Rubble Pile Near-Earth Asteroids

The authors explore the possibility that near-earth, rubble pile asteroids might be used as habitats for human settlement by increasing their rotation to produce spin gravity. Using previously published scaling by Maindl et al. and studies of asteroid populations, it is shown that there is no...

www.frontiersin.org

This is what science fiction authors have taken to doing to be published: becoming graduate students writing their hard SF in the guise of research papers. <Raises stick over lawn> In my time they would write science fiction stories as rigorously as scientific papers.

The paper does very little actual work while imagining how to create an O'Neill cylinder by spinning up a rubble pile asteroid and then using a mesh bag to capture the rocks flying off. The mesh is hand-waviumed away ("carbon nanofiber should do it") but the real gem is how they propose to spin up the asteroid: using solar powered rubble cannons that fire off rocks tangential to the surface.

I thought the paper a bit of a laugh, scientifically speaking, though they get A+ for imagination. All they need is a bit of character development and they have a good novella there.