I know space junk can fall to earth but does it ever go the other way and fly off into deep space?
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No, because to fly off into space a piece of debris would need to get a push from something. It falls to Earth because there’s still some (very thin) air up there, gradually slowing it down. There’s nothing up there to do the opposite and push stuff out of orbit.
No, space junk is typically from satellites and rocket launches, so everything is quite close to the earth. The earth’s gravity will make the junk come towards it.
It takes a lot of power to get past earths gravitational pull.
I guess if the voyager satellite and others, who are further away from earth will eventually become space junk and not come back to earth, but those would be the exception.
It would need energy to fly away. Where would that come from?
In order to come back to earth, it just needs energy taken away. Drag from space dust and the very thin atmosphere or hitting other pieces of debris will do that just fine
Yes, but not the normal satellites orbiting Earth. Examples of space junk that escaped into solar orbit are the third stages of some of the Apollo missions. They passed close enough to the trailing side of the moon to get a boost out into solar orbit.
The media misleads you when they say the astronauts in orbit are weightless. Technically they are weightless (if you put a scale under them it would show zero), but they are not massless, and are experiencing almost the exact same pull of gravity as their earthbound brethren. They are weightless only because they are in a state of perpetual freefall. They’re going so fast in a horizontal (relative to Earth) direction that they constantly miss hitting the ground in their fall.
To increase the height of your orbit you don’t use a rocket on the bottom of you spacecraft to lift you higher–you use the rocket at the back to increase your horizontal speed. You can throw an object in any direction you want in orbit, but all you’ll do is change the orbital path slightly–change the eccentricity slightly. You will not be able to do much since you are unable to produce anything other than a negligible change in kinetic energy.
A baseball on the ISS is going about 7800 m/s (7.8 km/s). A major league pitcher can throw it about 40 m/s. 7800 m/s is approximately equal to (7800 – 40) m/s.
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