Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla has shown the world what "falling forever" looks like in space. In a video, he offered a peek into life aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
In the clip posted to X, Mr Shukla is seen changing a camera lens while two cameras float freely around him. He dismantles the lens from one camera and lets it go, but instead of dropping to the floor, the equipment hovers mid-air. He then reassembles the lens and releases the camera again, which floats the same way.
"Believe it or not - Everything you see in this frame is falling," Mr Shukla wrote, using the video to explain one of spaceflight's most counterintuitive realities.
He explained that objects aboard the ISS don't fall in the usual sense because both the astronaut and the tools are moving together around the planet at the same speed. In other words, "no relative falling = no 'down'."
Mr Shukla explained that the concept of orbit could be traced back to physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton's famous thought experiment.
He explained that if you threw a ball from a tall mountain, it'd normally fall to the ground. But if you throw it fast enough, it will keep falling around the Earth without ever hitting it. That's what orbit is, a constant falling that never ends.
"It's falling forever, but it never hits the ground," he wrote on X.
The astronaut also admitted that, during his first days on the ISS, he struggled to overcome Earth-bound instincts. He initially hesitated to release objects, worrying they would fall as they do on the planet. His first instinct in space was to hand items carefully to his crewmates rather than letting go.
His fellow astronauts were equally cautious, leading them to pass things around like an "overly careful game of 'hot potato.'"
Contrary to popular belief, Mr Shukla said that astronauts were not beyond the pull of gravity.
"Astronauts don't feel weightless because gravity has disappeared-gravity up here is still about 90% as strong as at Earth's surface. We feel weightless because we and everything around us are constantly falling together. Floating in space is really just falling-forever," he said.
