Come to think of it, it won't be necessary to send up a lot of tubes all at once. Just try a few and test the concept of creating artificial gravity. You could build out gradually and test it in a stepwise fashion.
Let's review the artificial gravity equation below:
If each tube is 10 meters long, then two tubes will yield a radius of 10 meters- or half the total length. A radius of this size, plus an rpm of 6 will yield an artificial gravity "g" of approximately .4
You could test up to 6 rpm, and if that is too much to handle, then add tubes and slow down the rpm.
This technique of adjusting the size and rpm can yield an optimized result.
With artificial gravity, you could do a number of things that are a bit complicated in a weightless environment. One thing that I'd like to see is LFTR technology applied to space rocket propulsion. You could make it a nuclear electric hybrid which could be teamed up with the VASIMR technology.
The Molten Salt Reactor experiment at Oak Ridge built a 10 MW reactor. This should be relatively small reactor and fit into this scheme. It may even be possible to make it a bit larger. If so, that may make it possible to use it to skim atmospheric gases from the edge of space. A "LOXLEO" device requires about 6 MW of power in order to stay in orbit and process the gas collected.
The significance of this is that you'd be freed from having to launch reaction mass from the ground.
Update:
Next in Series, Part 6
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