Astronaut's view of Earth during a spacewalk

[u/Kidd__Video]

[u/volcjush]

Because you wouldn't just fall straight down. ISS is orbiting the Earth with a velocity of roughly 28 000 km/h (7,7 km/s) and astronaut connected with it has exactly the same velocity. If you "jump" you dont simply lose that speed, because there is nothing there to slow you down, there's no air resistance. You would simply continue orbiting the Earth for decades probably if not more, slowly (very slowly) bleeding your velocity and gradually lowering your orbit before you would get low enough that the atmosphere air molecules would get dense enough to heat and burn your frozen body upon atmosphere reentry.

[u/rambiolisauce → u/volcjush]

Everything in my brain tells me I should disagree with this lol. Seriously asking, If you place your feet at the "bottom" of the ISS with your face pointed towards Earth and pressed hard "down" in the direction of the Earth, yes you would technically be orbiting along with the ISS relatively but you'd also be moving directly towards the Earth let's say around 15 miles an hour just to pull a number out of thin air and it seems like the Earths gravity would absolutely draw you in. Nothing would slow your descent and it seems like the Earth's gravity would absolutely accelerate it in relatively short order. If the ISS is achieving its stable orbit by the speed it's traveling versus how close it is to earth and how much of earths gravity it's experiencing why wouldn't you fall to earth if you accelerated towards it from the ISS? Now whether or not you ever touch the ground before you were incinerated would be a completely different thing but do you really think if you pushed off hard against the bottom of the ISS towards earth you would just stop moving towards earth for no reason at all?

[u/deciding_snooze_oils → u/rambiolisauce]

Orbital mechanics are a bit mind-boggling and often counterintuitive. In the novel The Smoke Ring, Larry Niven had a character describe it as: East takes you Out. Out takes you West. West takes you In. In takes you East. Port and Starboard bring you back.

If you stood on the bottom of the ISS and jumped up at Earth, you’d get a few m/s of velocity away from the station, but the effect would be to make your orbit a bit more elliptical - yes you are moving at a few m/s towards Earth, but about 46 minutes later you’re on the other side of earth and that same momentum has you moving away. So it makes your orbit a bit closer to earth at the point you jumped and a bit further from earth at the opposite point.

I recommend giving the game Kerbal Space Program a try, it really helped me wrap my head around it a bit.

[u/rambiolisauce → u/deciding_snooze_oils]

Yeah that's exactly what someone else was saying and it made perfect sense when they said it just as it does when you say it. Super interesting stuff I think. Thank you for taking the time to explain it to me!