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Teachers and students studying space need to start by understanding basic concepts like these.
Free Fall: Star Trek and other space movies do not represent space travel accurately. In space, astronauts or cosmonauts are in free fall. You can experience a similar feeling on an amusement park ride such as "Drop Zone" or while parachuting (before the parachute opens).Astronauts just fall around the Earth continuously. They and everything in the spacecraft are falling at the same rate so they appear to float in midair.
Weightlessness : Since there is no force to stop astronauts from falling, their sensation of weight disappears. This feeling is often referred to as weightlessness. Other, somewhat-confusing terms often used to describe this condition are "zero gravity", "zero-G" and "microgravity", so called because gravity seems to disappear or go to zero.
