Category: Space

Most of us have seen Star Wars, where Han Solo flies into an asteroid belt and the tie fighters that follow him get smashed up because it is so hard to fly in an asteroid belt. He is warned by C3PO, his robot companion just how low the odds are of safely navigating it.

To see if that is true, let’s look at the asteroid belt in our own solar system! To get past Mars, NASA missions must navigate this asteroid belt. And even though real-life spacecraft are much too delicate to get hit by an asteroid, they’ve never had a problem whatsoever. This is because in our asteroid belt, the asteroids are usually still hundreds of thousands of miles apart. There are more “rocks” floating around than in other parts of our solar system, but NASA can easily navigate through them. Sorry, C3PO, the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field is much higher than 3,720 to 1!

We say this all the time, because we see videos of weightless astronauts floating in the space station, or jumping about on the moon. But those astronauts that jump on the moon don’t go off endlessly in that direction, which would happen if there were no gravity. They are pulled back by the moon’s gravity, even though it is just a small fraction of the earth’s gravitational pull. And those astronauts on the space station are in orbit around the earth . . . because of gravity!

So there isn’t no gravity in space, there is less gravity!

The Great Wall of China is often said to be the only man-made object visible from space. It makes sense that people would have said this, even centuries before we ever went into space. Though much of it is in ruins today, the Great Wall wall is said to be over 13,000 miles long. But astronauts have said again and again that they have great difficulty actually finding it.