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

Plenty of good answers already, but I’ll add that it depends on where you are when you stop your engines!

If you’re near Earth, 1,000 mph isn’t fast enough to escape it’s gravity, so you’d travel in an arc around it until the atmosphere slows you down enough to pull you in.
You’d need to be going closer to 20,000 mph to get further away! 1000 mph isn’t even enough to escape the moon’s gravity.

Best chance is you’re far away from everything else, and you continue drifting, with no gravity wells to eat you up.