One Revolution Per Minute is a short film created by Erik Wernquist to explore his fascination with artificial gravity in space.
In it, he imagines a ring-shaped, centrifugal spacecraft called the “SSPO Esperanta” that spins at one revolution per minute.
“I wanted to create a leisure-like environment, such as a hotel or cruise ship, and explore what the views could be like onboard when the orbiter visits some of the worlds in our solar system. I was also particularly interested in how light and shadows from the sun play around in the interior as it spins around,” Wernquist explains. “For those reasons, I decided to keep all artificial lights off – with the exception of some emergency lights to avoid complete darkness – and to only let natural light illuminate the interiors. As this made the place appear quite desolate, I found it interesting to imagine someone being onboard, alone.”
While the Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky imagined a centrifugal spacecraft early in the 20th century, and films like 2001: A Space Odyssey have embedded the image in our minds, Wernquist thinks it impractical.
“I believe that the perpetually spinning views would be extremely nauseating for most humans,” he writes.
Who knows what space tourism will bring. If it’s anything like One Revolution Per Minute, it’ll be stunning. It’ll be beautiful. It’ll also be stark and disorienting.
