XKCD speaks

These are posts from "Not Exactly Rocket Science," by the way.

In The Guardian, the author of the XKCD comic strip interviews an astronaut.  Did you watch the movie "Gravity" and pick it apart?  I didn't like that someone in a low-Earth orbit who wanted to catch up with someone else in the same orbit, but on the opposite side of the Earth, accelerated to catch up.  The XKCD and his astronaut had different problems.  For one thing, apparently the movie producers sometimes had Earth rotating in the wrong direction in the background.  The astronaut noted in passing that, when he was in orbit, he had to get used to the idea that north wouldn't always be up.