Treadmill in space?

Back in 2004, widespread popular interest in average folks going into space was rekindled with the success of SpaceShipOne. The privately-built ship won the X-PRIZE, a competition that required three people to travel to a 100 km altitude twice within two weeks.

Here's a happy little video looking back at that adventure, produced in 2009:

For those old enough to remember the heady days of the space race, and classic science fiction that assumed rocketports and beanstalks and all manner of travel for both specialists and tourists alike, SpaceShipOne brought back the hope and anticipation of human-based space exploration.

But then, a mere two years later, in 2011, a peculiarly uninformed article showed up on Blastr, part of "The Syfy Online Network." Syfy, whose tagline is "Imagine Greater," brings all manner of science fiction and other imaginative works to television. The Blastr item, titled 8 once-amazing sci-fi devices now inferior to real-life gadgets, includes as its 7th (not-numbered) item, the "360-Degree Treadmill from 2001 ... One-Upped by: An ordinary modern treadmill."

Here's the scene:

The Blastr article's comments section is now fully buried under heaps of product spam, but back when it was a fresh item, it was heartening to see so many folks come to the defense of what was--and is--perfectly good science in a film that made extraordinary attempts to get the science right.

True, because the film was by necessity shot on Earth, using something known as a "set" to simulate an actual spacecraft (which wasn't available for loan or hire), the filmmakers did have to design a "360-Degree Treadmill" insofar as they needed to simulate the rotation of the ship--and given ongoing restrictions against using magic in the presence of Muggles, they couldn't simply have the actors levitate to perform the scene.

Even given the minor amount of space we've managed to reach with people on-board to date, one of the challenges we fragile humans face is that we're creatures of gravity, and space doesn't seem to have very much of it in the space-y part. Or to be more accurate, gravity is all over the place, just not where we can make use of it very well when travelling through space. Being "weightless" is essentially falling with nothing to break that fall, meaning that space travellers are in "free-fall."

Using spin on a spaceship is one of the few known ways to simulate gravity. This detailed page on Artificial Gravity gives both the science for this as well as the some of the ideas explored by scientists and science fiction writers alike (not necessarily two distinct categories, FWIW).

While treadmills really don't have anything to do with spaceships under spin, it's interesting to note that treadmills--for exercise--were invented back in 1952. Treadmills for other purposes have been around for thousands of years, and among those ancient forms was--you guessed it--a 360-Degree Treadmill (treadwheel). Not such "modern" technology after all. One continues to worry about the kids these days--sometimes knowing a bit about the past can help the present, not to mention any imagined futures, make a lot more sense.