Artificial gravity in space may not make us dizzy after all

Very cool. Via Troy, who comments :

So the pop-science articles on the internet often make a big noise about spinning ships for artificial gravity, and that only 2 revolutions per minute is acceptable otherwise you get motion sickness: that famous centrifuge inside Discovery from 2001: A Space Odyssey would have to spin too slow to generate decent gravity.

But in space, the human body adapts by basically turning off the inner ear. Here's Tim Peake being by spun around by another astronaut at a rather insane speed - looks like 60 RPM, and he is in perfect control of his stomach contents. So, the Discovery centrifuge with its seemingly high rotation rate of 6RPM would be perfectly feasible for astronauts to adapt to.

In fact, astronauts aboard Skylab made their own gravity by running around the circular storage locker "track" at greater than 10RPM with no mentions of dizzyness or sickness.

I confirm he's spinning at about 1 revolution per second. So how many g's is that ? If his head is about 0.5 m away from the axis of rotation, that's a distance of 3.14 m per spin, so a linear velocity of 3.14 m/s. Which gives an acceleration of about 2 gs, which seems crazy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=GPnLShiJ-t4