How to Drive a Spaceship

I like to share a learning from looking at the .gif picture (below). 

Just imagine you are driving a spaceship (in blue) which has much less mass than another more massive space object (in black). You are approaching the other space objects and whoop! gravity (by Newton's law) increases (by the distance) and your spaceship's heading (direction) is now under gravitational pull (go on search the Net for ‘gravity pull hill wave’). You have to maneuver your ship to keep your flight plan (to go where you want to go --in 3 dimensions).

Think about it. This is a 21st Century skill. You won't learn it in any class for at least 20 years from now. But it can serve as an example a class of problems we will face.

To make the problems more interesting, I beg you to look up Kessler Syndrome (for another class of events in space around the Earth. You can also see that gravity offer another chance to learn about ‘space wars’. 

I will give some clues. There are thousands of satellites up there. They are posing a dangerous problem  just getting through ‘out of this world’. Because a collision with even a small fragment of ‘those satellites’ can do a lot of damage to the spaceship. What if some satellites or fragments are deflected (from their  orbits by a spaceship's gravity) toward Earth with some accuracy? 

We can learn from imagination – just add some realistic sciences and reasoning when ‘experiential’ lessons are not yet possible. ;-)

[GD]

Thanks for this interesting problem and knowledge.