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

Things in space move a bit like a puck on an air hockey table. Once they are moving, they keep moving in that direction until they hit something, or something pushes on them, or their engine pushes them. An air hockey puck doesn’t have its own engine, but it can hit things (like the table’s bumpers), and it can encounter external forces (like a player’s striker).

Differences that you’ll start noticing after you get to higher grades: An air hockey table is two dimensional, but space is three dimensional. An air hockey table makes the puck frictionless by floating the puck on a cushion of air. Space makes the spaceship frictionless by having practically no air. An air hockey puck still has some friction, but the spaceship has practically no friction. An air hockey puck has no engine, so cannot change its own speed and direction.The spaceship can have its own engine which it can use to change its direction and speed without having to have something hit it. Oh, and when something hits an air hockey puck, the puck bounces. When something hits a space ship, the space ship explodes.