We've all heard the idea that, in a vacuum, feathers and cannonballs fall at the same rate. It's pretty hard to test theories like that here on Earth, where a whole lot of outside influences can affect our results. We're lucky, though, because the coming of the space age has opened up opportunities we've never had before.
Space is perhaps one of the best laboratories of all.
It's vast, quiet, and relatively free from disturbances. We can learn how liquids flow, fires burn, and life adapts. By placing our experiments in freefall around the Earth, we can even remove most of the effect that gravity can have. Come see what we know, what we predict, and what we hope to learn through our experiments on spacecraft, the Space Shuttle, and the novel environment of the International Space Station.