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

OP, most of these responses are nonsense. There is no distance limit for gravity, so whether it’s a planet, star, or distant galaxy, you’ll start falling (accelerating) towards whatever is exerting the most gravity on you. It might be imperceptible at first, but you won’t just keep floating at the same speed and direction until you hit something like many have said.

That’s defined by Newton’s universal law of gravitation.

F= GmM/r^2

Where F is the force of gravity felt by two objects, G is the gravitational constant, M and m are the two masses, and r is the distance between their centers of mass.

1000mph seems fast to most people, but it’s tiny compared to the scale of outer space. It might as well be 0.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton’s_law_of_universal_gravitation

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