Horrible science question

At their altitudes, there isn't enough of anything like air to push back on them as they fly around at high speeds, because earth's gravity isn't strong enough. When you feel air pushing on your hands in a car, that's newton's third law. In space there simply aren't enough particles of anything to push back on you as you move forward.

Low orbit is close enough to the earth to experience almost the same full force of gravity we do. But the spacewalking astronaut doesn't "feel" gravity because he's literally falling continuously around the earth, never hitting it. ("Free fall" is the term").

His spacecraft is also falling. So is his umbilical cord and fellow astronauts. They all fall together at the same speed so there's no reason for any of it to move with respect to anything else. They seem weightless.

Look up Isaac Newton. He shows how firing a cannon with faster and faster muzzle speeds would eventually allow a ball, moving fast enough, to literally fall all the way around the earth without hitting it. Although this is impractical - we use rockets, not cannons - Newton's original explanation of how an orbit works is still the best one around, centuries later.

I don't remember the science of it, but there is this old fifties era sci-fi movie that explained it well. The movie can be found on YouTube and is called "Destination Moon". Robert Heinlein was the technical advisor on that movie.

























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Imagine the unknown being the first man in space to open the door. It goes against all instincts. In the US we don't hear much about the first man who did that probably because it was a Russian.