It’s funny actually. When standing on a planet, as most of us have done our whole lives, the “horizon” being horizontal just feels right. But the second any one of us plays a space video game, it pretty much immediately feels right to travel “beside” planets, instead of over or under them. Even though functionally the only difference is how you orient your craft relative to the planet of course. And, in most space games I’ve played, you even have more rotational thrusters for pitch than you do for yaw, so you’d think over or under would still feel better as you have more control.
But keeping the planet to your side is still the most common behaviour, and completely unprompted. So while these photos were of course rotated, they don’t at all look weird to me, and I only thought about why when they looked weird to you. Hehe. I have approached thousands of planets this same way.
I have definitely had this experience in KSP and never really thought about until this comment. Neat!
However, there is a practical reason the Apollo mission orbited on its side like this. The side of the spacecraft facing the sun would get very hot while the side facing away would get very cold. So the spacecraft would roll slowly as it travelled for passive thermal control. They literally callrd it the barbecue roll.
Orbiting a planet along it’s equator means orienting north/south (normal/antinormal) for a natural roll axis. Neat stuff!
It’s funny actually. When standing on a planet, as most of us have done our whole lives, the “horizon” being horizontal just feels right. But the second any one of us plays a space video game, it pretty much immediately feels right to travel “beside” planets, instead of over or under them. Even though functionally the only difference is how you orient your craft relative to the planet of course. And, in most space games I’ve played, you even have more rotational thrusters for pitch than you do for yaw, so you’d think over or under would still feel better as you have more control.
But keeping the planet to your side is still the most common behaviour, and completely unprompted. So while these photos were of course rotated, they don’t at all look weird to me, and I only thought about why when they looked weird to you. Hehe. I have approached thousands of planets this same way.
I have definitely had this experience in KSP and never really thought about until this comment. Neat!
However, there is a practical reason the Apollo mission orbited on its side like this. The side of the spacecraft facing the sun would get very hot while the side facing away would get very cold. So the spacecraft would roll slowly as it travelled for passive thermal control. They literally callrd it the barbecue roll.
Orbiting a planet along it’s equator means orienting north/south (normal/antinormal) for a natural roll axis. Neat stuff!