Escape velocity = Orbital speed / square root of 2

It will stay in orbit and eventually come back to the spot where it was kicked

It will escape Earth's gravity and travel into deep space

You have to run 4 times between the wickets

You have to carry your bat to the other wicket

To keep the center of mass as low as possible

Because people are trained to handle dangerous situations

Because dangerous situations are not common

Because most things are not actually dangerous

Because people are cautious and avoid danger

How do bikes and motorcycles stay up? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly explain escape velocity, what’s going on with cricket, and the physics of bicycles.

Okay, so the high wire, the reason why they carry this big stick that's left and right, okay?

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

Right, so we've had some questions and 1 of them landed right in my backyard.

It's how hard would you have to kick a soccer ball, or if you want a football, to get it into orbit?

dreaming, People are dreaming superpowers on this 1.

So now just so you understand, here on planet Earth, the highest recorded kick in the professional game, and this might surprise people,

It was like a bowling ball, knocked everybody down.

This is a Brazilian guy called Ronnie Heberson, and he's done it a couple of times.

He wasn't a 1 and done on this sort of speed, So he's got previous for it.

So it's interesting that the design of the new balls has enabled them to travel faster, which is speeding the game up, which is exactly what everyone was after.

What I wonder is, because I don't study soccer balls, I know it's a big deal before every World Cup, but the amount that the ball compresses so that when it's coming off your foot, there's not only the speed of your foot that's translated to the ball, there's the recoil of the ball off your toe for you having compressed it.

Yeah, there's the deformation and then the...

The deformation, but it's not just a deformation, because you can deform something that doesn't bounce back, and then it's no good, Right?

Very comfortable, very comfortable slow game.

But no, it's interesting because you're now starting to roll this out.

Is it an American football you want to kick into orbit?

Do you want to go away from inflated balls?

And then, you know, what's it going to take to get a baseball into space, a golf ball into space?

You know, where does your mind take you as to the sort of projectile aspect of it?

But I was surprised because I didn't think the top speed of a soccer ball would be anywhere near 130 miles an hour.

Plus, when I played Little League, and I have to think about why this is true, but I could always hit a Spalding pink ball way farther than a baseball.

And that's obviously an air-filled ball that responds quickly.

You know, I think they call it tearing the cover off the book.

Yeah, so you unstitch it and remove the leather, and then there's basically rubber bands that are just, it's a continuous sort of rubber, it's like rubber bands.

And you keep doing that, and then there's this like little… String.

Last I did this, I don't know if it's different today, little pink ball.

It's like the size of a marble, a little bigger than a marble in the middle.

A mini planet in the middle of magma, right in the center.

It's a cool, stupid, geeky fact, all right?

The escape velocity for any object, so for Earth it's 7 miles per second.

Yeah, I was gonna say, maybe Superman could kick a ball that hard.

So here's, here's, Oh, by the way, so it's not a matter of strength.

Okay, it's a matter of speed of your foot.

And he has super everything that's human, which we once discussed, Chuck.

We concluded he must also have super flatulence.

We have to take that 1 out of our archives.

So you take the escape velocity for a planet, okay,

divide it by the square root of 2, and that's the speed you need to get into orbit.

So, what is 7 divided by square root of 2?

So the space station and the space shuttle and Elon Musk and all these folks orbit the Earth at 5 miles per second.

So that's lower than the escape velocity, obviously, because you're still in orbit, but escape velocity and orbital speed, low orbital speed, are precisely related by that formula.

And in fact, the derivation of that was on my general exam for graduate school.

Straightforward, but you have to know that that's a thing, all right, and then figure out how to do it.

Anyhow, the point is 130 miles an hour, it ain't happening on Earth.

So I take my ball and I go off, off world.

And where am I going to go to get myself my jollies about kicking the ball into deep space?

You're not fast enough even for the largest asteroid, is Ceres.

In fact, Ceres is so large, C-E-R-E-S, from the root of cereal comes from that, by the way.

Ceres was the goddess of harvest, I think, 1 of these farm goddesses, and we get cereal from that root word.

So point is, Ceres is so large as an asteroid that its own gravity shaped it into a sphere.

But round things too small to be planets are called dwarf planets.

Pluto got demoted from planet to dwarf planet status and Ceres, which was in the ranks of asteroids, got promoted from asteroid to dwarf planet.

So on Pluto and Ceres, the escape velocity is about, what do we get, about a third of a mile an hour.

No, no, no, sorry, sorry, mile per second, excuse me.

These are, you know, yeah, they're hundreds of miles across, these objects.

So, the question is, What size object can we satisfy Gary's Superman urges?

So Haley's coming, not as big as they come, but it's, you know, we've all heard of it and it's visible.

And we're going to kick balls from 1 asteroid to another.

You're going to land it on another asteroid

So we can all run at least 1 mile per hour.

So if you run too fast, you can jump yourself into orbit and to escape velocity.

So you're right, Gary, you'd have to get a configuration of asteroids and comets.

And again, all of these are 10, you know, 2 dozen miles across around there.

Practically anything we throw as humans or kick would achieve escape velocity.

So we need to wait for 1 of those meteor showers.

The comets we're talking about are 10, 20 miles across.

The asteroid that took out the dinosaurs was 6 miles across.

Okay, you don't want these, this is not what's falling in a meteor shower.

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Things You Thought You Knew – Kicked into Orbit