Imagine floating through the air or standing on the ceiling. An astronaut orbiting, or circling, the earth in a spacecraft can do both because of something called weightlessness.
Orbiting the earth is really a lot like falling in space. If you threw a stone from a very high mountain, it would curve down gently before it hit the ground. The harder you threw the stone, the further it would go. The surface of the earth is curved. What if you could throw a stone so hard that the curve as it fell was exactly the same as the curve of the earth? The stone wouldn’t hit the ground – it would go into orbit. In other words, it would become a satellite of the earth.
A spacecraft “falls” around the earth in the same way. This constant falling makes everything inside the spacecraft seem like it has no weight at all.
What happens then? The astronauts float, unless they hang on to something! Anything they “drop” floats in the air when they let go of it. And if they jump, they don’t come down. They hit their heads on the ceiling instead.
Picture Credit : Google
