The design concept of a modular and extensible hypergravity facility is presented. Several benefits of this facility are described including that the facility is suitable as a fullscale artificial-gravity space-settlement ground analogue for humans, animals, and plants for indefinite durations. The design is applicable as an analogue for on-orbit settlements as well as those on moons, asteroids, and Mars. The design creates an extremely long-arm centrifuge using a multi-car hypergravity vehicle travelling on one or more concentric circular tracks. This design supports the simultaneous generation of multiple-gravity levels to explore the feasibility and value of and requirements for such space-settlement designs. The design synergizes a variety of existing technologies including centrifuges, tilting trains, roller coasters, and optionally magnetic levitation. The design can be incrementally implemented such that the facility can be operational for a small fraction of the cost and time required for a full implementation. Brief concept of operation examples are also presented.The ground-based extensible and modular ESHGF design concept described in this paper produces an adjustable, hypergravity-level (gravity exceeding 1g) environment in a 150m radius rotating facility for people to work and live in along with animals and plants for long-term periods. The design is extensible so that it can be incrementally implemented so that small-scale operations can be realized within a relatively short schedule and relatively low budget. The ESHGF capabilities and capacities can be incrementally increased as demand and budgets permit.
B. Challenges of Extending Life Beyond EarthIn order to permanently extend life beyond Earth, several challenges must be addressed, a few of which are discussed in this section. For the most part, addressing these challenges has been avoided to lower the cost and complexity of short-term, spaceflight missions.At the request of the NASA Administrator to make recommendations on the health of astronauts for longduration missions, the National Academies Institute of Medicine committee recommended that NASA focus on giving, "increased priority to understanding, mitigating, and communicating to the public the health risks of longduration missions beyond Earth orbit" and "using more extensively analog environments that already exist and that have yet to be developed;" in 2001. 4 In 2009, the International Academy of Astronautics Study Group on artificial gravity recommended that, "the most efficient means of developing an effective flight artificial gravity countermeasure is by appropriate and timely use of ground facilities". 5 The 2012 report by The National Academies National Research Council (NRC) Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board of their review of the NASA Space Technology Roadmap states, "The panel identified Artificial Gravity Evaluation/Implementation as a gamechanging capability that would greatly mitigate many adverse health effects that would otherwise occur during longduration habitat...
