Last week, Variety’s big headline was typical: “Richard Branson Makes Successful Space Trek on Virgin Galactic Unity 22 … as they shot up far enough to escape Earth’s gravitational pull”
We’ve heard this repeatedly since we were kids. It was wrong then and it’s still wrong because you simply can’t travel far enough to escape Earth’s gravity. When last week’s billionaire reached the apex of his journey, there was still more than 90% of Earth’s gravity tugging at him and his crew. So to get this straight just this once, be aware that whenever you fall, everything else falling with you keeps you company. You fall together.
A severed elevator cable would make this frighteningly clear, since your fellow passengers would all be drifting around inside that car. In practice, rockets bound for the Moon, Mars or merely in Earth orbit, have shut their engines off so they fall downward while also maintaining their sideways inertia. At the right height and speed, Earth’s curvature bends down away from them at just the right rate so they can remain falling while sufficiently zooming sideways to never hit the ground.
Yet TV narrators somehow prefer to “explain” that the crew has “escaped” our planet’s gravity. In reality, even astronauts on Pluto would “feel” Earth’s gravity. Gravity diminishes with the square of distance but is never completely gone. At the 254-mile altitude of the International Space Station, one would feel 90% of Earth’s surface gravity, with a 200-pound man feeling himself as weighing 180 pounds if the craft were merely hovering at that height.
None of this will surprise those of us raised by socialist-leaning parents who cautioned us about the penchant of the “idle rich” to alleviate boredom by doing things like paying Sherpas to physically carry them up Mt. Everest — which one client actually did, as described by Jon Krakauer in his bestseller, Into Thin Air” When I went to Mt. Everest in 1967 (merely near enough to see it up close; there were no accessible roads or airports at that time), my motivations were some amalgam of curiosity and anticipated ego-based bragging. When it nowadays comes to paying a private company $81 million so you can say you’ve ventured to “the edge of space,” there are probably similar motivations, with “science” figuring in there somewhere, but hardly meriting the kind of Explorer’s Club banners earned a century ago by the likes of British adventurer Robert Falcon Scott and Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen as each aimed to be the first to reach the South Pole.
The purchasable “I escaped from Earth” experiences include a handful of supposed milestones that no publication has yet seemed inclined to spill the beans about. So, just to be clear, one cannot see “the curve of Earth” from such a height. The photos that appear to show a non-horizontal horizon are solely a camera artifact caused by ultra-wide-angle lenses which produce the same effect that makes wide-angle Manhattan shots show non-vertical buildings. Nor can anyone see or photograph stars in the sky above a continent illuminated by sunlight.
Astronauts I’ve interviewed over the past half century describe the most truly memorable sights from orbit as being thunderstorms far below, meteors streaking beneath them and the Northern Lights creating vast green regions that enveloped virtually half of the entire field of view. Clarity of starlight, however, was a letdown. Andy Thomas, who grew up in Australia’s Outback, told me that the thick Plexiglas diminished star brightness by roughly the same amount it had been boosted by being seen from above our atmosphere, and the result was pretty much a wash.
Still – wouldn’t you go?
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