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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with the physics of Gravity?

Space is far, FAR less crowded, and you won't ever see something big coming at closing rates of 50,000 mph unless it's huge.

The cascade effects take months or years to play out, not minutes.

Things in LEO are not typically moving at 50,000 mph.

Turns out LEO is about 18000 mph, not the 25,000 I estimated... so the max closing speed should be less than 36,000 mph for opposite direction objects.

Travelling between orbital spacecraft is not as easy at it sounds.

In general. But in specific cases it can be?

Here's some interesting commentary on the delta-v and the movie Gravity. https://www.rocketstem.org/2013/11/03/delta-v-gravity-situat...

Just considering the orbital heights, they fudged it a bit.

What makes it laughable is the inclination, the ISS is ~51 degrees and the Hubble is ~29.

That's something like a 3500m/s burn.

Well the Russians used to do this when they had Salyut and Mir space stations.

As an example multi-space station mission: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_T-15

The part where he was hanging on to the tether and then let go and flew away seemed pretty bad to me.

Tears that float away from your face as a perfect lil' sphere ... that's what encapsulates it all for me.

I mean.. there definitely are perfect little spheres involved in the process.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v5gtOkyCG0

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