¶ Twelve-Inch Steel World Globe
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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
- RBF Address, transcript p.5, Tel Aviv, 16 Jun’72
