If I was on a satellite, and I pushed an apple towards earth, would it stop falling and level out?
And if I was on a satellite and pushed an apple in the opposite direction at the same speed I was travelling
(net speed = 0), would it start falling towards earth?
In: Physics
Orbital mechanics are counterintuitive. If you are in orbit things don’t move in the direction you push them.
If you push something “down” it will instead move “forward” ahead of you in orbit, you need to push it “back” to get the object to move “down”.
So yes pushing the apple “back”, i.e. slowing it down will make it go lower and lower.
The trick with orbits is not that you are somehow preventing the orbiting object from falling down, it is to move so fast that as you fall down you keep missing the ground.
“Horizontally” is an object that not just flat-earthers have trouble with. In every day life we keep treating the idea of “horizontally” as a straight line. Obviously in reality the earth is not flat and on a big enough scale horizontally ends up meaning a curved path rather than a straight one.
If you are in orbit and try to move not parallel to the ground but on a straight tangent to a curve that is parallel to the ground, you would in theory move away from it.
To imagine that put a ruler on top of a ball. The further you go from the point where the ruler rest upon the ball the greater the distance between the ruler and the surface of the ball.
So moving in a straight line while up above the earth actually gets you away from the ground. The earth curves away beneath you is you move straight ahead.
Of course gravity is a thing and as the same time as you move away from the earth you also fall towards it.
When you fall down at the same rate as the earths curves away from you, you keep the same distance from it.
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