the other weird moment i had in astro class this semester was when one of the homework problems described a spaceship that used centrifugal force to create gravity and asked us to draw a picture of which way the gravity would go and do a bit of math about rotation speed and stuff.
i, a person who has read a ton of sci fi and also seen The Martian, was like "oh sure" and had an immediate mental image and found that problem pretty simple to complete, especially compared to some of the more complex physics stuff on the homework.
however My Experiences Are Not Universal and for literal weeks afterwards i kept hearing other students in lecture and lab who were complaining about how hard the homework was bring up "the spinning spaceship problem" specifically as something that had really confused them.
really the entirety of that astro class has been me realizing over and over again that other people are taking intro to astro for reasons other than "i think space is super cool and have for years and also love sci fi" lol
