

A very common image in everyone's brain is an astronaut jumping around on the moon like it was a trampoline in his backyard. Bouncing around in space without a care, and without gravity. But that's a load of bull because there is gravity in space – a lot of it. The reason that astronauts appear to be weightless is because they are orbiting the earth. They are falling towards the earth but moving sufficiently sideways to miss it.

Part of me is convinced that astronaut training is just a bunch of guys in a room reading Douglas Adams, at the heart of this theory is what Adams says is the knack to flying, "The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. That is, it's going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard." So, basically astronauts figured out how to fly in space and that makes them even cooler than they already were.

But I digress, another interesting fact is that when a shuttle reaches orbit height (around 250 miles above the earth), gravity is reduced by only 10%, which means space is like being in a bounce house 24/7. There is still gravity in a bounce house and there is gravity in space.