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Texas A&M University has reactivated a mothballed NASA centrifuge to create what its operators describe as one of the most capable human space research facilities in the United States, filling a gap that has forced American researchers to run partial-gravity studies overseas for more than a decade.

The Anthony Wood ’87 Artificial Gravity Lab, announced by Texas A&M University, centers on a centrifuge originally built in 2005 for NASA’s Constellation Space Exploration Program. The hardware sat in controlled storage at Johnson Space Center after Constellation was canceled in 2009. It is now spinning again, this time in College Station.

The timing matters. NASA is sending astronauts back toward the Moon and drafting serious plans for Mars surface operations, and the agency still does not have a clear answer to a basic question: how much gravity is enough to keep a human body working.

A facility built around a specific gap

According to Phys.org, the centrifuge can simulate lunar gravity at one-sixth Earth’s level and Martian gravity at three-eighths Earth’s level for extended durations. Current trial runs last only minutes. The lab’s operators say they expect to push sessions to roughly two hours as the facility matures.

That jump from minutes to hours is the operationally useful part. Parabolic flights produce seconds of partial gravity. Drop towers produce less. Neither tells you much about how a cardiovascular system behaves once it has had time to settle into a new loading regime.

Dr. Bonnie J. Dunbar, the aerospace engineering professor and former NASA astronaut leading the program, said the centrifuge addresses an important gap because the U.S. currently lacks domestic capability for combined bed-rest and centrifuge studies.

Those two methods together, bed rest and centrifuge, are what make the Texas A&M setup unusual. Bed rest simulates the deconditioning of microgravity. A centrifuge reintroduces loading. Run them in combination and you can study how much partial gravity, and for how long, actually protects human physiology.

Why the threshold question is urgent

Recent animal work has sharpened the stakes. A study published in Science Advances and reported by Gizmodo exposed mice aboard the International Space Station to artificial gravity at 0.33 g, 0.67 g, and 1 g for up to 28 days using JAXA’s MARS centrifuge system. The researchers found that 0.67 g appeared to be a threshold: below it, muscle deterioration began.

Lunar gravity sits at roughly 0.17 g. Martian gravity sits at about 0.38 g. Both are well below the mouse threshold.

Lori Ploutz-Snyder, dean of the University of Michigan’s school of kinesiology and former lead scientist for NASA’s Exercise Physiology and Countermeasures Project, told Gizmodo that parabolic flight work in humans has identified a comparable threshold somewhere between 0.5 g and 0.75 g. Whether that overlap is coincidence or signal is unresolved.

Mark Shelhamer, a Johns Hopkins professor and former chief scientist of NASA’s Human Research Program, put the uncertainty plainly to Gizmodo: before this study, he said, researchers knew almost nothing about how much gravity is required to halt the deconditioning humans experience in space.

That is the question the Texas A&M facility is built to chase in humans rather than rodents.

The research program on day one

Dr. Ana Diaz Artiles, primary investigator for the \”Gravity Dose\” studies on cardiovascular response, is currently running parabolic flight research in Europe, according to Phys.org. Her work connects to a broader question about how the heart and vasculature respond to intermediate gravity levels rather than the binary of 0 g and 1 g that dominates existing data.

The lab is also slated to support research on heat transfer in partial gravity and on spacesuit design. Both matter more than they sound. Thermal regulation inside a pressurized suit behaves differently when convection currents change with gravity. Suit joint loading, center-of-mass management, and fall recovery all shift at one-sixth g.

Dunbar said reopening the centrifuge positions Texas A&M to be a centerpiece for space health research at a moment when the country is returning to the Moon and planning for Mars, according to Phys.org.

The institutional story behind the hardware

The centrifuge’s history is worth sitting with. It was built for a program that was canceled. It was stored for more than a decade. It is now being used to answer questions that did not have the same urgency when it was mothballed.

That pattern recurs across NASA’s history. Capability built for one program gets shelved, then rediscovered when the agency’s direction shifts again. The Constellation-era hardware now spinning in Texas is doing work the Artemis program needs, even though Artemis did not exist when the machine was built.

There is also a quieter institutional point here. Running human centrifuge studies abroad is not just expensive. It creates dependencies on foreign facilities, foreign review boards, and foreign subject pools. For research that feeds directly into mission design and countermeasure development, domestic capability is an operational asset, not a nicety.

What this does and does not answer

A centrifuge on the ground is not the same as partial gravity in space. Subjects still feel 1 g through their long axis unless they are tilted or positioned in specific postures, and Coriolis effects on a short-radius centrifuge introduce their own confounds. Researchers know this. The value of the Texas A&M facility is not that it perfectly replicates the lunar surface. It is that it lets investigators control dose and duration in ways that flight experiments cannot.

Combined with bed rest, the centrifuge becomes a countermeasure testbed. If a subject spends weeks in head-down tilt to simulate microgravity deconditioning, then receives scheduled centrifuge exposure, researchers can ask how much artificial gravity, at what frequency, produces a measurable protective effect.

That is the kind of data mission planners need before committing to a lunar surface stay measured in months or a Mars transit measured in years.

The broader picture for human research

The Artemis II crew’s recent public appearances, covered by the BBC, reminded observers that lunar return is no longer a PowerPoint goal. Actual humans are preparing to go. The physiological questions that seemed academic a decade ago are now design constraints.

If the 0.67 g mouse threshold holds in any meaningful way for humans, then neither the Moon nor Mars provides enough gravitational loading to keep an astronaut healthy without intervention. That means exercise protocols, pharmacological countermeasures, or engineered partial-gravity exposure on the surface itself.

Each of those options requires the kind of data a bed-rest plus centrifuge facility can generate. The retired hardware now running at Texas A&M is, in a real sense, the instrument that will tell NASA whether its current plans for long-duration lunar presence are physiologically realistic.

The honest answer to how much gravity humans need is that we still do not know. A facility that can hold a person at one-sixth g for two hours, day after day, is how we find out.

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“excerpt”: “Texas A&M has reactivated a Constellation-era NASA centrifuge to answer a question NASA still cannot answer: how much gravity is enough to keep a human body working on the Moon or Mars.”
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