Yes Artificial Gravity Could Happen, But It Would Be Very Expensive
Could we create artificial gravity in a space station? The short answer is "yes," the slightly longer answer is "yes, but it'd be more expensive and require more materials than it is realistically possible to consume." Brian McManus explains it all in his latest Real Engineering video.
The reason space stations are constantly spinning in films and TV shows is that spin is required for any remotely realistic kind of artificial gravity. If you're on Earth, you've got two forces pulling on you: your normal force, which we call "weight," and gravity. Without gravity, you need to make a person accelerate to keep their normal force where it naturally is on Earth. When you're dealing with a stationary space station, like the ones seen in Elysium or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, that would come in the form of acceleration perpendicular to the velocity of the person. In other words, spinning.
Where the rubber meets the road, though, is price and materials. A station capable of attaining the acceleration needed for human use would have to be huge. Using Elysium as his model, McManus goes through the trillions of dollar we'd need to hire SpaceX to send all the materials into space-unless we built an elevator. But even then, that's assuming that there's even enough accessable metal in the world to build it. It may be a good start to not defy the laws of physics, but it's still a tough sell with so many practical issues standing in the way.
Source: Real Engineering
