09. Does it feel weird to be beyond Earth? What does your body feel like once you are in space? (A K2S Question)
From The Space Library
Even close to Earth, in orbit where astronauts visit often, you would feel weightless. In orbit, gravity still acts on you almost as strongly as it does on Earth but you are moving along with your surroundings so that it seems that you are weightless. This is called apparent weightlessness and it is responsible for the familiar images we see of astronauts floating in their spacecraft and space stations. Apparent weightlessness looks like a lot of fun and you can probably imagine lots of fun results. One very funny result is that if you spill your drink, it will form into a wiggling ball floating in front of you! Apparent weightlessness is a very commonly misunderstood concept. Some get this wrong in public-level explanations, often using the term micro-gravity. Weight is the force that the Earth exerts on objects. The Earth is pulling on the Shuttle astronauts with very nearly the same force that it does on the Earth's surface. It's the orbital motion, and the fact that the astronauts and Shuttle are orbiting at the same distance from the center of the Earth, that produces the apparent weightless conditions.
Answer provided by Luke Keller, Ph.D.
Question and Answer extracted from the book Kids to Space - by Lonnie Schorer
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