“There is no gravity in space”

It's a common misunderstanding that outer space is a place devoid of gravity. This belief likely stems from the iconic images and videos of astronauts floating effortlessly inside spacecraft and the International Space Station (ISS), giving the impression that they are in a truly gravity-free environment. However, this perception couldn't be further from the truth. Gravity is a universal force, acting between any two objects with mass, and it extends infinitely throughout the cosmos, though its strength diminishes with increasing distance.

The scientific reality is that astronauts in orbit are not experiencing an absence of gravity, but rather a continuous state of freefall around Earth. The ISS, for example, orbits at an altitude where Earth's gravitational pull is still remarkably strong, approximately 90% of what we experience at the planet's surface. The sensation of "weightlessness," or microgravity, that astronauts feel is precisely because they, and their spacecraft, are constantly falling towards Earth while simultaneously moving forward at incredible speeds, effectively missing the planet as they circle it. This perpetual fall creates the same feeling you would get at the top of a roller coaster drop or in a free-falling elevator.

People commonly believe in the absence of gravity in space because their everyday experience on Earth firmly anchors them to the ground. The visual evidence of floating astronauts, without a clear explanation of freefall, naturally leads to the conclusion that the force holding them down on Earth simply isn't present out there. This powerful visual, combined with the term "outer space" itself suggesting a void, contributes to the widespread but incorrect notion that gravity doesn't exist beyond our atmosphere.