![]() ![]() ![]() Space is a place, but to be anywhere in that place is to be in motion. And as the station is slowed by the slight drag of the upper atmosphere, an engine periodically fires to keep it from falling in toward Earth. Other gyros keep the station pointed forward. Gyroscopes continuously modify the station’s orientation, or “attitude,” to keep its mostly flat grid of modules parallel to Earth’s mostly flat surface, so that scientific instruments and observation windows look down (or in). The International Space Station, which orbits about 250 miles up (or out), is designed to mitigate these tidal complexities. We can imagine the International Space Station crew living in a very tall building with all the intermediate floors removed. On the side of the ship closest to Earth, objects drift inward. Areas of the ship that are farthest from the planetary center are subject to less gravitational tug, and they move faster than the center of the ship’s mass, so objects there drift outward with respect to Earth. With a large, massy, complicated object like a spacecraft, we have to deal with gravity gradients and spin motion. A spacecraft that accelerates forward moves to a “higher” orbit - up, or as Fuller would have it, “out.” Firing retro rockets to decelerate, it moves “in.” But these dynamics only apply to a dimensionless point. In the counterintuitive mechanics of orbital space, objects are continually falling on a trajectory that misses the spherical ground of the planetary body below. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Free Space, 1883. This basic design - primary thruster, secondary retro rockets, axial gyros for orientation - has been used by all crewed Russian and American spacecraft to date, including the International Space Station. ![]() It has engines at both ends of a primary spine and gyroscopes on the other two axes, so that it can spin round and fire rocket thrust in any direction. Tsiolkovsky’s ship seems better equipped than its passengers to operate in a fully three-dimensional environment. Four figures float in a spherical spaceship, each pointed in a different direction, disoriented. A drawing in his 1883 manuscript Free Space might be the first depiction of humans in orbital weightlessness. 4įyodorov’s most famous follower was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose astronautic theory shaped the Russian (and later the Soviet) space program. They believed humankind had to become vertical - had to resurrect the dead who lay flat in their graves, even - in order to escape the Earth’s surface and achieve immortality. For Nikolai Fyodorov and the Cosmists, in pre-revolutionary Russia, horizontality was the ultimate barrier. ![]() Meanwhile, the open sky has been conceived alternately as an unattainable place of infinite freedom or as a hard dome that limits the world, like a cake lid over a Flat Earth. Human occupation of and movement through space on our home planet has been dominated by the horizon and the apparent flatness of the ground plane. To describe motion and existence in a vast universe, where planetary surfaces are the exception, we would need a new language.įor centuries, the space away from the Earth’s surface - “outer” space - has confounded attempts to make sense of it with terrestrial geometric schemes. To describe motion and existence in a vast universe, where planetary surfaces are the exception, we would need a new language. Standing on Earth, we see the ground plane as flat, but we know the planet is a sphere. And for the first time they begin to feel real reality.” 3 Writing in 1970, at the dawn of extra-planetary space travel, Fuller identified a break in humans’ spatial perception. “They all laugh about it,” he wrote, “But if they try saying in and out for a few days in fun, they find themselves beginning to realize that they are indeed going inward and outward in respect to the center of Earth, which is our Spaceship Earth. Instead of downstairs and upstairs, he encouraged people to say instairs and outstairs. It’s a bottomless pit.”īuckminster Fuller had an unusual way of talking about stairs. ![]()
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