Jet Castilian
Spaceport America, Spaceport Asia, and Spaceport South all have about the same design. The basic form is a long axle with a wheel rotating around it to provide a pseudo-gravity environment for passengers and station operations.
The image I’m showing here isn’t the real spaceport, of course, but it gives you an idea.
The axle doesn’t turn and is used for docking interstellar ships. It’s hollow in the middle so people and cargo can move along it. We usually call it the spindle.
The wheel, called the “terminal ring,” has the general shape of a giant tricycle wheel. It is 1.8 kilometers in diameter and 180 meters thick, with five wide spokes connecting the outer rim—the tricycle’s tire—back to the axle. (A tire is a good analogy, too, because that side takes a lot of damage from space debris and looks all black and banged up, not shiny and new like you see in the pictures.) The rim houses the spaceport terminal itself, which is essentially a way station for passengers coming and going to and from Earth, as well as a processing station for cargo and spacecraft.
For people within the terminal ring, “up” is toward the axis of the wheel and “down” is out toward space. Here are a few points that always come up:
- When we dock in our orbiter, we come and go through the “top” of the wheel, which passengers always think is the “inside.”
- When you walk around in the terminal you get a pretty good imitation of Earth gravity, but the trick is to follow the blue lines on the floor that are parallel to the direction of rotation. If you walk diagonally, there are Coriolis forces that make some people sick.
- When you go from the terminal to the spindle, you take an elevator “up,” but by the time you get to the top you’re in a no-gravity zone. When you go in the other direction, spindle-to-terminal, you start off in zero-G and they strap you in at what seems like weird angles. Once you get to the terminal it starts making sense again.
DOUG WALKER WRITES 