EDIT: Thank you all for your kind yet informative responses!
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Because they’re not accelerating (much). Down here on earth, you’re spinning crazy fast as well *along with the whole planet*, and the planet in turn isn’t sitting still in space either. It’s all relative.
Newton’s law: Objections in motion tend to stay in motion. The ISS is moving at 17,400 MPH, but so are the people inside it. The station isn’t firing its engines.
During launch, the astronauts experience plenty of forces as the rocket blasts off into space and accelerates up to 17,400 MPH. Once they reach that speed though, it’s all calm.
Same idea as on an airplane. Takeoff and climb pins you to your seat, but once you’re cruising everything is (mostly) calm and you can walk around casually even though you’re going around 500 MPH.
The astronauts share the station’s momentum. Think you sitting on a bus. You’re also unaffected as long as it’s constant speed. You only feel changes in speed – you’re pushed into your seat when the bus speeds up and you’re hurled towards the front if the bus breaks too hard.
Because thats not how speed works. You don’t feel the speed at which you’re moving. You feel acceleration.
The same way you can travel in a car at 60 MPH and more without being affected at all. Or travel at hundreds of miles an hour in an airplane. Or feel like you’re perfectly still when you’re traveling at a thousand miles per hour because of the Earth’s spin. You only feel acceleration, not speed.
Once you reach a certain speed and acceleration drops to 0 then for the person inside the system (ISS) nothing will seem to have any effect. Only a person outside the system will appreciate the 17.400 MPH.
It is like you are on a train.
Those high speed can reach 200-300(?) Kph, but as long as you go on a straight line without any change in altitude, or bumps, you feel like you do not move.
It’s not the speed that’s dangerous, it’s the acceleration. A standard commercial airplane flies at hundreds of miles per hour and the people on board are unaffected, watching movies and drinking ginger ale.
The astronauts on the ISS are in a similar situation, moving fast, but staying at basically the same velocity (ignoring the fact that technically they’re accelerating in an orbit around the earth). All of us are also traveling at unfathomable speeds rotating on the earth’s axis, around the sun, around the galactic center, etc.
When you travel 60km/h in a car, what do you feel? If you drop something from your hand, it’ll fall straight down because no other force affects it. Humans can’t sense speed – they can sense acceleration?
**ALL** Movement is relative. When you say that something is traveling at such and such mph, for it to make any sort of sense you have to specify what you’re measuring relative to. Typically in normal conversation we don’t explicitly specify what we’re measuring relative to, and it’s always heavily implied that it’s relative to the surface of the earth, and that’s what is being referenced for the 17,400mph speed of the ISS. However, relative to the astronauts, it’s essentially not moving. It’s the same reason you can sit in a car traveling fast and be unaffected by the speed of the car.
Because their bodies are moving at the same speed of the station, so they don’t experience motion.
If the station were to quickly accelerate/slow down, then the astronauts would be affected. The station is hardly changing speed though. The astronauts definitely do get affected when their rocket is accelerating quickly to 17,000+ MPH.
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