• Question: Is there anyway that you can stop floating

    Asked by jake.w7 to Anne, Beth, COLFlight, Jon, Tom on 2 Oct 2015.
    • Photo: Jonathan Scott

      Jonathan Scott answered on 2 Oct 2015:

      If you mean, can you stop yourself floating around, then yes you can by securing yourself to the vehicle you’re travelling in – on the International Space Station there are foot restraints that astronauts put their feet into to stabilise themselves when they are working, and their sleeping bags can also be secured to the walls of the station to help them sleep. If you mean, can you stop floating altogether, then yes you can, but you need to create artificial gravity – to do this, you need to spin people/things (spinning creates acceleration which acts in a similar way to gravity), which you can do by either spinning astronauts on a short-arm human centrifuge inside a space vehicle, or spinning part, or all of the vehicle itself. Both of these solutions are technically very complicated to achieve.

    • Photo: Columbus Flight Directors

      Columbus Flight Directors answered on 4 Oct 2015:

      Sergio:
      The idea of a spinning spaceship has been studied by many, but it has many technical difficulties.
      One of the problems is that the centripetal acceleration, which would emulate the gravity acceleration, is equal to the square of the angular velocity multiplied by the radius of rotation (the distance from the center of rotation).
      Imagine an astronaut standing in the centrifuge: his head would be closer to the center than his feet. This means he/she would feel a smaller artificial gravity in the head than in the feet. If the radius of the centrifuge is, say, 5 meters and we consider the astronaut to be about 2 m tall, this would mean that if the feet feel an artificial gravity of 1, the head would feel an artificial gravity of 0.6.

      Therefore, the only solution is to build a spaceship so huge, that the height of the astronaut can be neglected. This would mean a circular spaceship with 20 m of radius, something that nowadays we are not yet able to build.

    • Photo: Tom Morse

      Tom Morse answered on 7 Oct 2015:

      Hi Jake.

      Have a look online for videos of ISS spacewalks (EVAs).

      Those guys are incredibly agile with tethers and ropes. I’d love to learn more about that process!

      Tom

    • Photo: Beth Healey

      Beth Healey answered on 7 Oct 2015:

      There are ways to artificially stop yourself from floating as the others have already explained. This is particularly important when you are trying to sleep!! Here is some interesting information on the NASA website which you may like to take a look at 🙂

      http://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/F_Sleeping_in_Space.html

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