Given that earth travels through space at a rate of 67,000 miles per hour, why didn’t it move away from the Apollo 11 astronauts when they left earth orbit?

Question

Given that earth travels through space at a rate of 67,000 miles per hour, why didn’t it move away from the Apollo 11 astronauts when they left earth orbit?

In: Physics

Answer 1

You will notice that the moon didn’t fly away at 67000 miles an hour either.

It’s like when you’r in a car that’s moving at 60 miles an hour and you throw a ball inside the car; the ball doesn’t immediately zoom backwards 60 miles an hour, because it is still carrying the momentum of the car’s motion. Relative to the car, you only threw the ball up and down. Unless some external force (like air resistance) causes some other force on the ball, the ball is going to go up and come right back down to your hand

There was no other force pushing Apollo 11, or any other space mission, in any other direction. It maintains it’s relative position to Earth, the moon, etc