"You're going very fast when you're on orbit, going around the world once every hour and a half"
About this Quote
Speed, in Robert Crippen's telling, isn’t a flex; it’s a calibration. "Very fast" lands with almost comic understatement, the kind you only get from pilots and astronauts who’ve been trained to treat the extraordinary as a checklist item. By translating orbital velocity into a human-friendly metric - "around the world once every hour and a half" - he turns an abstract number into a visceral punchline: you’re not just moving quickly, you’re lapping the planet on a schedule.
The intent is partly explanatory (spaceflight as lived experience, not equations), but the subtext is about perspective and discipline. In orbit, you’re simultaneously hurtling at roughly 17,500 mph and floating as if motion has stopped. That contradiction is the quiet awe behind the line: velocity so extreme it feels like stillness. Crippen’s phrasing bridges that cognitive gap for Earthbound listeners, reminding us that "weightlessness" is not the absence of physics but the result of being trapped in a very elegant fall.
Context matters: Crippen was a key Space Shuttle figure, part of the early era when NASA had to sell the Shuttle as both frontier and routine machine. The quote carries that institutional voice - demystify without diminishing. It’s wonder delivered in plain language, with a pilot’s insistence on what’s measurable, and an astronaut’s awareness that the measurement is, on its own, already unbelievable.
The intent is partly explanatory (spaceflight as lived experience, not equations), but the subtext is about perspective and discipline. In orbit, you’re simultaneously hurtling at roughly 17,500 mph and floating as if motion has stopped. That contradiction is the quiet awe behind the line: velocity so extreme it feels like stillness. Crippen’s phrasing bridges that cognitive gap for Earthbound listeners, reminding us that "weightlessness" is not the absence of physics but the result of being trapped in a very elegant fall.
Context matters: Crippen was a key Space Shuttle figure, part of the early era when NASA had to sell the Shuttle as both frontier and routine machine. The quote carries that institutional voice - demystify without diminishing. It’s wonder delivered in plain language, with a pilot’s insistence on what’s measurable, and an astronaut’s awareness that the measurement is, on its own, already unbelievable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
|---|
More Quotes by Robert
Add to List
