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Huh. I would have thought that once they break orbit that the sun's gravity well would do the heavy
liftingpulling.If you care to learn orbital mechanics, Kerbal Space Program is a great teacher.
That one's been sitting unplayed in my library for a very long time. I guess it's time to give it a shot.
And if you want more complicated orbital mechanics there's a ksp mod: Principia which adds n-body orbital mechanics over ksp's relatively simple patched conic orbital simulation.
Imagine that you're standing on a train and have a baseball. If you throw the ball off the train, the ball will still have momentum in the direction of the train's movement.
If you want to throw the ball to a friend the train just passed, you have to be able to throw the ball faster than the train is moving or it will never reach them.
Now all im imagineing is a ball floating mid air and it's beautiful
Mythbusters did this! (Well, the ball fell to the ground, but for a split second it looked like it was hovering after being shot out of a cannon.)
Oh nice. Im re-watching then on youtube at the moment so will have to keep an eye out for that one.
once you break out of earth orbit you are now in an orbit around the sun, similar to earths.
The vessel would still have a lot of speed after escaping earth's orbit, so the trajectory would become a large orbit around the sun. You still have to slow down by about ~30km/s (or ~100 000 km/h) to make that orbit intercept with the sun's surface.