Food & Drink1 min ago
Leaving Earth's Orbit
How many people have ever left earth's orbit? (I know what I think the answer is, but I have just read a different figure in a book!)
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.I can get to 24 - Apollos 11 to 17 left the Earth's orbit to travel to the moon - and each had 3 astronauts on board so that's 21. Apollos 8 and 10 also orbited the moon so that's 6 more, but 3 of them (Jim Lovell, John Young and Gene Cernan) are included above, so that makes 24 in total. Apollo 7 and Apollo 10 stayed in earth's orbit, as did the Skylab astronauts and Space Shuttle Astronauts. I read 27 yesterday (although frustratingly I can't find it again in the book!), so I wondered if I had missed someone out. I'm pretty sure the Russians stayed in Earth's Orbit.
Surely the question which you are asking is how many have left the earth's atmosphere, that is gone into space. No one has actually left the earth's orbit which would require travelling to the gravitational pull of another planet.
You would have to go even further to escape from our sun's orbit.
If you leave earth's orbit you are going to have a tough job getting back!
te hee - didn't mean this to become a question about orbital mechanics. My understanding is that you can fire an object into space, and at a certain distance from the earth, the laws of orbital mechanics say that the object will fall toward the earth at the same rate the earth curves away from it, so it will stay locked in that orbit, possibly for ever, powered only by physics. In order to leave that orbit, it would be necessary to speed up sufficiently to reach an altitude where the laws no longer applied. In Apollo, that meant firing up the engines on the space ship, in order to head off to the moon. At some point, they would then become locked in orbit around the moon. So whilst they might technically still be orbitting the earth (and the sun and the centre of the solar system etc etc), they were not "locked" in earth's orbit. So how many people have done that?
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