In my world, I have an asteroid station that was spun up to produce artificial gravity.
Characteristics:
- The asteroid is treated as cylindrical, with a radius of 1.5km and a length of 5km. Assuming a density of 2g/cm3 at the behest of Wikipedia, this produces a mass of 70,680 metric tons, not accounting for any mass lost to the station built into the rock. Materially speaking, the asteroid is solid and rocky.
- The asteroid is spinning at around 66 meters per second/0.4rpm, to produce 0.3g of artificial gravity.
Methodology
The asteroid was not spun up without preparation - that would obviously cause it to fly apart. My current explanation revolves around coating most of the surface in two meters of steel, with 250m radius openings left at each "pole," one for a docking bay and one for radiators. The station inside the rock has been reinforced to one-g construction standards to prevent cave-ins and the like.
Question
Is this setup structurally realistic, or would this lead to a broken asteroid and lots of dead people? If no, is it possible with stronger materials?