Artificial Gravity Swimming Pool

One of the uses that has been proposed for fully reusable launch vehicles is "space tourism", the making of short visits to low Earth orbit by fare-paying passengers. This seems to offer the potential to generate a large commercial market, of the order of tens of launches per day, which could amortize the development cost of a new generation of reusable launch vehicles. Recently there has been a considerable increase in research concerning this possibility, with an international symposium being held in Bremen, Germany in March 1997, a session being held on the subject for the first time at the 1997 IAF Congress, the Space Transportation Association in Washington DC publishing a report on it in collaboration with NASA, and the AIAA holding a workshop on the subject in January 1998, among other activities. Once businesses start to offer travel services to low Earth orbit, it is expected that orbiting "hotels" will be developed to enable guests to enjoy a variety of entertainments in Earth orbit. One feature of such hotels will be sports centers providing guests the opportunity to enjoy moving about freely in weightlessness, or "zero gravity". This paper considers one possible facility in such a sports center, namely a rotating, artificial-gravity swimming pool.