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Right City Rong Planets
It’s really Wright not Right, and wrong not Rong, but it’s right because via route J it’s only 11 miles from my mother in law’s house and Bob gives us a good rate at his motel.
His Wi-Fi sucks though.
He’s from India and since I speak a little Hindi he likes me even though it’s my wife that does the negotiation. The two of them work out a rate which is better than we could get elsewhere.
It was…
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Why don’t these “thousands” of satellites fall back to Earth, if the likes of the ISS has to use booster rockets to stay up there? It all depends on how thick the atmosphere is where the satellite is orbiting. The atmosphere doesn’t just “end” at a certain height.
How come some things can escape gravity? After all, it’s supposed to pull everything down. Maybe it is density and not gravity. It is escape velocity, once achieved, that allows us to escape. Here is an image to illustrate the point. Once you achieve escape velocity, gravity gets weaker as the ship goes outward, and it does not cause the ship to return.
When in orbit, astronauts experience weightlessness. What is this caused by?
When in orbit, astronauts experience weightlessness. What is this caused by?
Astronauts are not weightless. They experience micro-gravity.
As close to the earth that they are, gravity is a huge factor. You couldn’t, for example, step outside and just float away into space.
The reason it seems to be weightlessness is that the ISS and the astronauts inside are all falling at the same speed. The forward movement causes and angular movement away from the earth and the…
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If you fire a gun vertically from the earth's surface, but there is no friction, would it return to earth?
If you fire a gun vertically from the earth’s surface, but there is no friction, would it return to earth?
Yes it would return to Earth. The escape velocity for Earth is more than 11 km per second or 33 times the speed of sound. This is about 9 or 10 times faster than a rifle bullet.
So even without air friction the bullet’s going to go up, gradually slow down, and fall.
The problem is that without friction it’s going to come down too fast and kill someone at roughly the same speed as when it left the…
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Newton's Cannon
Newton’s Cannon
Once upon a time, Sir Isaac Newton had a cannon. Noisy thing that. Orbitologists call the figurative device “Newton’s cannon.”
I managed to borrow one of these cannons from the National Museum of Orbitology and Conjecturism, and am standing next to a large pile of cannonballs (see image).
Depending on all sorts of factors, like how much gunpowder, how big the cannonball, etcetera, I’ve discovered…
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