David Jensen will send robots to an asteroid that orbits near Earth but never crosses our planet’s orbit to create an environment suitable for human life there.

In works of science fiction, it is common to see hundreds of thousands of people living on a space station. Although that may happen one day, in order to build a structure of this capacity, an astounding amount of raw materials would be required. But even then, its inhabitants would face two major problems: low gravity and high radiation.

And David Jensen, a retired engineer from the American aerospace technology company Rockwell Collins, came up with a bold idea to remedy these problems. According to him, in order to build a habitable space station, an asteroid is needed that humans can modify according to this purpose. study on that is arXiv Featured on a prepress server.

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According to him, robots capable of assembling themselves could build the complex in just 12 years, at a cost of about $4.1 billion. Calculating the current exchange rate, this amounts to approximately HUF 1,444 billion.

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Jensen has already found an asteroid that might be suitable for conversion. This is Atera, a near-Earth object that never crosses our planet’s orbit. Its diameter is about 4.8 kilometers, and it has a small moon, about one kilometer in diameter.

The specialist’s idea is to use the materials found on the asteroid to build the space station and even solar panels. According to Jensen, the asteroid’s shape is ideal for a donut-shaped structure, with its outer part protecting its inhabitants from everything from radiation to micrometeorites. Several levels can be built inside.

Atera completes a complete revolution on its axis every 3.4 hours, but the expert believes that this pace must be accelerated to have a gravity similar to that of Earth. He calculated that this should take 105 seconds per cycle – and he highlighted the point IFLScience.

According to Jensen, the key lies in the robots that will be able to build the space station, and when they’re finished, we can send them to another asteroid, where construction can start again.

It can be argued how realistic this idea is, but at the same time, assuming further technological development, it is not at all inconceivable that such a project would become possible sooner or later. But of course, somewhat later.

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