If you were in a spacecraft moving at 1000 miles/hour in outer space and you turned off the engines, what would happen to the speed and direction of your spacecraft & why?

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If you were in a spacecraft moving at 1000 miles/hour in outer space and you turned off the engines, what would happen to the speed and direction of your spacecraft & why?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

1000mph isn’t anything special in the context of space travel. It’s actually very slow in cosmic terms.

Locally and short term it’d look like you just keep going straight at constant speed.

Long term, gravity will draw you toward the most gravitationally dominant object (moon, planet, star, galaxy, etc, depending on how far out you are).

If you were travelling radially outward you’ll gradually slow down then fall back toward it. If you’re travelling tangentially, you’ll travel in an elliptical path with the centre of gravity of the system at one focus of the ellipse. If the ellipse approximates a circle there won’t be much change in speed. If not, you’ll accelerate each time you approach the object and slow down as you move further out.

If you’re ever close enough to a body with atmosphere you’ll lose speed to friction until you fall inward, either burning up or landing (destructively unless you’ve accounted for the landing very carefully with heat shield and parachutes).

If there’s no appreciable atmosphere, you’ll continue to travel elliptically until you die from lack of supplies. Other massive bodies will gradually alter your orbit and thousands, millions or billions of years later your path will be altered significantly enough that the ellipse either intersects a body or sends you on an escape trajectory.

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