The thought of an entire space station being reliant on none of four bearings three times the size of a football stadium ever needing maintenance and never seizing up is terrifying.

You can’t just spin down a station like that for maintenance, can you?

I believe technically you’re correct, but practically it’s unworkable.

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rini17 a day ago | parent [-]

Noone says it's easy. But at least have inside a small rotating cylinders for 1-2 persons to sleep and exercise in. Should be doable with active stabilization so that it isn't sloshing and not endangering anything if it seizes.

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hinkley a day ago | parent [-]

I'm somewhat fond of the 'bolo' design - several habs cabled together and spun.

While the cables are now a new 'single point of failure', Tethers, Inc had (has, as it turns out they have not gone under as I suspected) some pretty compelling ideas of how to avoid that by using a mesh instead of a cable, so micro-meteoroids couldn't sever the cable with one extra-lucky hit.

	▲	rini17 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That has issues with getting in and out. It's possible to solve everyhing, like have a zero-gravity "hub" in the middle, reachable from the habs by lift climbing the ropes. Or have pulleys reconfiguring whole habs as needed. But again anything moving in space and with life support sounds like massive r&d effort.