William H. Paloski, Ph. D. Human Adaptation and Countermeasures Office NASA Johnson Space Center Artificial gravity is an old concept, having gotten its start in the late in the 19th century when Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, considered by many to be the father of the Russian space program, realized that the human body might not respond well to the free fall of orbital space flight. To solve this problem, he proposed that space stations be rotated to create centripetal accelerations that might provide inertial loading similar to terrestrial gravitational loading. Einstein later showed in his...