Why don't astronauts fall towards the Earth while in outerspace?

Answer 1

They, along with the shuttle and/or space station, are travelling at an orbital velocity. This is the speed at which you are moving fast enough to circle the earth without escaping it's gravitational pull. Any faster and they would be off into outer space, any slower and they would fall to earth.

Answer 2

There is not 'zero g' right outside our atmosphere. Earth's gravitational field has an infinite range, just like the gravitational field of every other object in the universe. The strength of this field scales inversely as the distance squared. An orbit is simply what happens when something is thrown towards the horizon so fast that by the time it has fallen 1 meter downwards, Earth's surface has curved away by 1 meter, leaving the object at the exact same altitude, yet perpetually falling. There are also more complicated elliptical orbits, but the circular orbit is the simplest to understand. An astronaut orbiting the Earth orbits the Sun as well, because the Earth itself orbits the Sun. There is no sensation of weight in orbit because one is perpetually falling. The sensation of weight is not caused by gravity. Rather, it is caused by something under your feet *resisting* gravity. In orbit, gravity alone dictates your motion, and nothing opposes it, therefore there is no sensation of weight.

Answer 3

As others have said, they are falling toward the earth. What most humans call "0 gravity" is actually a free fall when talking about the astronaughts and space shuttle. As someone already pointed out, they are traveling in an orbital vector which keeps them from crashing back down to the ground but the vector increases the time until this happens. If you left said astronaught in space for a long time he will fall back to earth. This happened about 10 years ago with the Sky Lab. Sky Lab was a laboritory built in space back in the 60s or 70's and then abandoned. It crashed into the ocean about 10 years ago as its orbit decayed.

Answer 4

The guy who said that gravity doesn't effect them is wrong. Gravity reaches thousands of miles into space. They're a couple hundred at most.
The spaceship is moving at 17,500 miles per hour. Gravity is pulling the ship toward earth, but the speed is pushing it over the edge of the earth faster than the gravity is drawing it toward earth.
An astronaut out of the spaceship is traveling at the same speed as if he were inside. The speed is maintained because of the lack of atmosphere. There is no friction on anything at that height.

Answer 5

If they are in orbit, they are falling toward earth, but at that height due to the curvature of the earth, the earth is falling away from them at the same rate, so they stay at the same altitude until some force changes their speed.

Answer 6

Earth's gravity tries to pull the spacecraft down, but at the same time the spacecraft's speed is trying to hurl it outward. The two forces cancel and the result is a circularized orbit around Earth.

Answer 7

They are in continuous freefall towards the Earth, staying aloft because of their horizontal motion. The effect of gravity diminishes with distance, but it never truly goes away. Which also makes it look like they're "weightless"

Answer 8

They ARE falling constantly.

Their orbit is around 17,000 mph, or about 90 min to orbit the Earth. They are moving in a straight line. But the Earth maintains just enought tugging on their mass to prevent them from shooting out into space. So, in a sense, they are constantly falling...

Answer 9

They do. However, since they are moving (along with their spacecraft) in a direction perpendicular to gravity (what we call, "in orbit") they maintain their vertical height from the surface.

They are esentially, "falling in a circle" around the earth.

Answer 10

They are falling towards the earth just as quickly as they are falling away from it. This keeps them at a constant distance from the earth.