Briefing
You'll never fall off the Earth because gravity's always there to pull you back. Here's a Mind Game where you use that force to accomplish your mission to space.
Activity
Each round, your challenge is to launch your ship to dock with 1 or more stations in outer space. To do this, you have three controls:
THRUST: How much force your rocket ship will use to fly.
ANGLE: Set the path you'll take off on your mission.
LAUNCH: Blast off.
Experiment with different settings and see if you can complete each of your goals in as few tries as possible.
Debriefing
Did you find you spent more effort working against gravity? Or did you launch your ship and let gravity take over for you?
More Info
If you throw a ball into the air, eventually it falls back down to the ground. Why? Because the Earth's gravity pulls it in.
All objects (even you!) have gravity, but only really big objects, like planets and stars, have so much gravity that we can see the effect. The more massive the object, the stronger the gravity.
When something like a rocket ship passes by the Moon or the Earth, it's pulled toward that object by gravity. The closer you are to an object, the more its gravity pulls on you.
Rockets that are launched from the earth have to work against gravity -- otherwise they would never get off the ground! So they have powerful engines that push them forward. The force the engines produce is called thrust.
When you launched your rocket, the path it took depended on how much thrust you put behind it, the angle at which it was launched, and the gravity of the Moon and the Earth. You probably noticed that the gravity "bent" the path of your rocket -- sometimes directly into the Moon!
Sometimes, when a rocket passes close enough to a planet or a moon, the combination of gravity and thrust will be just enough to lock it in an orbit. That's when an object goes around and around another object. Objects in orbit are really "falling" toward the planet or moon all the time, but they're also moving sideways just enough to avoid crashing into it!