So, here’s a question. If you are “weightless” in space, do you still have mass? Yes, the amount of stuff you’re made of is the same on Earth as it is in your space ship. Mass does not change but since weight is a measure for how much gravity is pulling on you, weight will change. Did you notice that I put weightless in quotation marks? Wonder why?

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Weightlessness is a myth! Believe it or not, one is never weightless. A person can be pretty close to weightless in very deep space but the astronauts in a space ship actually do have a bit of weight.

Think about it for a second. If a space ship is orbiting the Earth what is it doing? It’s constantly falling! If it wasn’t moving forward at 10’s of thousands of miles an hour it would hit the Earth. It’s moving fast enough to fall around the curvature of the Earth as it falls but, indeed, it’s falling as the Earth’s gravity is pulling it to us.

Otherwise the ship would float out to space. So what is the astronaut doing? She’s falling too! The astronaut and the space ship are both falling to the Earth at the same rate of speed and so the astronaut feels weightless in space. If you were in an elevator and the cable snapped, you and the elevator would fall to the Earth at the same rate of speed. You’d feel weightless! (Don’t try this at home!)

Click here to go to next lesson on Physics Fun in an Elevator.

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