the.com/orbital mechanics
the physics of falling toward something forever and always missing it.
means the branch of physics that predicts how objects move under gravity, letting you steer a spacecraft by doing basically nothing but waiting.
from grew out of kepler's laws and newton's law of gravitation in the 1600s, then got weaponized by cold war engineers who needed to hit the moon on purpose.
counterintuitive burnsspeeding up can lower your orbit, not raise it
hohmann transfercheapest route between orbits, invented in 1925 by an elevator engineer
three body problemadd a third mass and exact solutions vanish forever
apollo marginapollo missions relied on orbits accurate to seconds