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?

Question

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?

In: 13

Answer 1

Note that, if you’re running the engines, you’re not going at a constant speed. You’re accelerating.

You don’t maintain your speed by running the engines. You maintain your speed by cutting them off.

To slow down, you need to point your spaceship backwards and fire the engines again.

You can’t deploy airbrakes. The equivalent would be to deploy a solar sail, but that only works near a star.