Do astronauts feel gravity? Yes — they just don’t feel their weight
Gravity at the space station is about 88% of what it is on your kitchen floor. Here is why that still produces floating, and what astronauts actually feel.
5 min read
This question usually gets one of two answers, and both are wrong. The first is “no, there is no gravity in space”. The second is “no, that is why they float”. Gravity is very much there, and floating is not evidence against it.
How much gravity is actually up there?
The space station orbits at roughly 420 km. Gravity weakens with distance, but it weakens with the square of the distance from Earth’s *centre* — and Earth’s centre is already 6,371 km away from you right now. Going up another 420 km barely changes the sum.
Work it through and the pull at station altitude is about 8.6 m/s², against 9.81 m/s² at the surface. That is roughly 88%. An astronaut who weighs 70 kg on Earth is being pulled almost as hard in orbit as they were on the launch pad.
So what are they feeling?
Weight is not gravity. Weight is the sensation of something pushing back — your chair on your legs, the floor on your feet. Gravity pulls you down, the floor refuses to let you through, and the squeeze between the two is what you feel all day without noticing.
In orbit nothing pushes back. The astronaut is falling, the station is falling, the coffee is falling, and they are all falling at the same rate along the same curved path. Nothing presses on anything. That absence of pressure is what we call weightlessness, and it is a completely different thing from an absence of gravity.
The word scientists use
The technical term is microgravity, not zero gravity, and the “micro” is doing honest work. There are small residual accelerations aboard the station — atmospheric drag, the crew pushing off walls, machinery vibrating — typically around a millionth of surface gravity. That is what the prefix refers to. It has never meant that gravity is switched off.
What astronauts do feel
- On the way up: several g. A crewed launch is deliberately held to a few times normal weight, pressing them back into the seat.
- In orbit: nothing pushing back at all. Fluid shifts upward in the body, faces puff, and the spine lengthens by a few centimetres.
- On the way home: several g again, this time from deceleration in the atmosphere.
- Back on Earth: their own weight, which after six months feels genuinely unpleasant.
So the honest answer to “do astronauts feel gravity” is that they are subject to nearly as much of it as you are, they simply have nothing solid to press against. And the reason that matters is that a child told “there is no gravity in space” has to unlearn it before orbits make any sense at all.
Common questions
Do astronauts feel gravity in space?
They are pulled by gravity at about 88% of its surface strength at station altitude, but they feel no weight, because they and their spacecraft are falling together and nothing presses against them.
How much gravity is there at the International Space Station?
About 8.6 m/s², compared with 9.81 m/s² at Earth’s surface — roughly 88%. Orbiting at 420 km adds very little to the 6,371 km you already are from Earth’s centre.
Is it zero gravity or microgravity?
Microgravity. Zero gravity is a misnomer. Small accelerations from drag, crew movement and machinery remain, typically about a millionth of surface gravity.