What is the Earth’s escape velocity?
Escape velocity from the surface of the Earth is about 11.2 kilometers per second (or just over forty thousand km/h, or twenty five thousand mph), meaning that if you want an object to leave Earth and never fall back, you have to throw it at least that fast. How does that work? Well as you’ll remember from high school physics, Newton’s law of universal gravitation tells us that an object’s weight (The downward force applied by gravity) depends inversely on … Continue reading →