Astronauts arrive at International Space Station just 8 hours after launching

__s

Surprised article skipped distance. ISS is 400km away, so 50km/h to reach? Obviously being a bit facetious, but gives some idea of what they're working with

lukeweston1234

Interestingly, I found that the record for the Soyuz capsule is around 3 hours, as they prefer much more direct paths. https://www.space.com/soyuz-makes-fastest-space-station-crew... Doing a bit of napkin math, it looks like this Soyuz mission made only 2 full orbits; this mission making ~5.

majiy

Obligatory XKCD, explaining what the basic problem of getting into orbit is: https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

potamic

I never knew it took this long. Are they accelerating throughout this time? Would love to see some visualization of this journey.

mmh0000

I highly recommend that everyone play the video game "Kerbal Space Program"[1]. It'll give you such an intuitive "feel" for how orbits work and how to solve the problem of "docking" in orbit. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/220200/Kerbal_Space_Progr...