Weightlessness

Weightlessness

         There are a lot of miss conceptions about the concept of weightlessness. When most people think of weightlessness they think that you actually are weightless and that you are not feeling the effects of anything like gravity. However, this idea is wrong and you cannot actually be weightless because there is always gravity acting upon you. The only way that you could possibly be weightless is if you were infinitely far from the surface of the earth but as we all know that is not possible. 

If you were to experience weightlessness like an astronaut that would only occur if there is an absence of any contact forces on the body. To further explain this concept we can use Newton's 3rd law. Newton's 3rd law states that every action has an opposite reaction. In our case gravity is the action and the opposite reaction is what we call normal force.                                                                
Now normal force is the component of a contact force that is perpendicular to the surface that an object contacts. When astronauts are in space and they are experiencing this constant freefall they are not being affected by gravity or the normal force so they are experiencing weightlessness. Some people might wonder how did they record the scenes in the movie if they are not in space. Well you don't necessarily need to be in space to experience weightlessness and you can do what they did in order to record it. To record the scenes for the movie they took a plane provided by NASA called a KC-135 plane and they would fly up to 36000 feet in the air and then dive. When they would dive they would briefly counter the force of gravity and this would allow them to temporarily experience weightlessness.

In the movie they showed very realistic representations of physics especially since they actually experienced weightlessness during the scenes. All of what happened were true representations of what happened and what does happen when you enter space.






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