(07-21-2021, 07:09 AM)homebiscuit Wrote:

(07-20-2021, 10:04 PM)Bchbunnie4 Wrote: If you happen to fall off the space station, would you float out into space, or get sucked back down to earth?
Serious question, cuz I have no clue and I’m not a nerd.

Objects in orbit aren’t actually floating. They’re falling around the earth at orbital speed. In the case of low earth orbit and the mass of the space station, that’s about 17,500 MPH. The ISS is about 240 miles up.

The best analogy is an object at the end of a string and spun around a central point. The central point is the Earth, the string represents gravity and the object is an orbiting craft. As the object is spun faster, its orbital distance around the central point increases. As long as that momentum is maintained, the object is propelled outwards but remains tethered to the central point by the string (gravity), although gravity could be more accurately depicted as a rubber band. Once it begins to slow, the orbit of the object decreases. And so objects in Earth orbit behave on the same principle. If the ISS were to come to a sudden stop, it would plummet to the Earth like a rock at supersonic speeds before it encountered the atmosphere and burned up.
 
Even at the altitude the ISS is now, it’s orbit must be boosted on occasion because of orbital decay caused by gravity and drag from encounters with faint remnants of Earth’s atmosphere. 

(deep breath) So, to answer your question, if an astronaut were to become untethered from the ISS, they would ‘float’ until the forces mentioned earlier caused their orbit to decay and would burn up in the atmosphere. That process would take several weeks, if not months. They would long be dead before becoming a shooting star.