Twelve-Inch Steel World Globe

RBF Definitions

(A)

"...And Professor Goddard then said: Here's our planet Earth

going around the Sun at 60,000 miles an hour. And you and I are

on board with it going at 60,000 miles an hour around the Sun.

If we take any of the objects on board in this co-orbiting of

the Sun, and accelerate one of them, as it leaves this Earth

every time it doubles its distance away, the attraction-- the

tendency to fall back in-- is only one-quarter of what it had

been before. It wouldn't have to go very far out before there

would be no tendency to fall back in at all. That is you would

then be affected by other bodies in the Universe. Out of this

came our rocketry but very few people would have really pictured

this in any kind of a model form. To get a little idea-- when

we were first told that the vehicles being rocketed into the

sky had gone into orbit the altitude that they did so was about

100 miles out from the planet Earth. You and I, with the highest

mountain at five miles, and the highest flying jet plane flying

at about ten miles out, 100 miles is way out. And it is so far

out that people don't start to try to picture it.

"But I'd like you to take a twelve-inch globe representing an

8,000-mile diameter Earth: and 100 miles in relation to 8,000

miles is 1/80th. And you'll find then that if you take a

twelve-inch globe, the thickness of a paper match, the thinness"

Citations

C19252