History Main / GravitySucks

* {{Inverted|Trope}} in ''Literature/{{Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator}}''. When the Elevator gets "too high", it spontaneously starts orbiting the Earth.
* Actually averted in the ''Franchise/StarWarsLegends'' novel ''[[Literature/NewJediOrder Vector Prime]]'', where the weird gravity device used by the [[ScaryDogmaticAliens Yuuzhan Vong]] to ColonyDrop Sernpidal's moon onto the planet does not cause a "sucking" effect, but instead the moon's orbit decays more or less realistically every time it passes over the device. Not that there's anything realistic about a superweapon that produces a gravitational force greater than a planet's.

-->'''Sam''': Suppose you were on a ship for Mars and they announced that the power plant had gone blooie and the ship was going to spiral into the Sun? What would you think?
-->'''Max''': I'd think somebody was trying to scare me. (... A) spiral isn't one of the possible orbits. And (...) if a ship was headed for Mars from Earth, it couldn't fall into the Sun; the orbit would be incompatible.

* Justified in Creator/AndreNorton's ''Literature/SargassoOfSpace'', where the entire planet was turned by ThePrecursors into a superweapon capable of generating a very powerful gravity-like field that pulls spaceships from afar (possibly even from hyperspace) and crashes them on the surface of the planet.
* In ''[[Literature/SkylarkSeries The Skylark of Space]]'', [=DuQuesne's=] ship is caught in the pull of a dead star. Notably it induces a sickening sensation of ''falling'' even though the characters are now used to freefall.

* In the ''Series/DoctorWho'' episode "Voyage of the Damned", the starship ''Titanic'' begins to predictably crash into the Earth as soon as its engines fail. [[spoiler:This might be justified, though, as the ship's owner was planning to crash it, so it was already on a collision course to begin with.]]
** In "The Impossible Planet", the Doctor repeatedly says that it's "impossible" for a planet to be in orbit of a black hole - and when the artificial gravity machine fails, the planet gets sucked straight inward, as is the spaceship in which the humans are trying to escape.

** In "The Name of The Doctor" The TARDIS drops like a stone towards the planet Trenzalore the very second The Doctor turns off the anti-gravs. To be fair, the TARDIS was probably not actually in orbit (instead using "anti-gravs" to simply hover in place).

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UsefulNotes/BlackHoles are particular offenders of this nature, because everyone knows that their gravitational pull is so powerful even light cannot escape and the subatomic particles that constitute you will be ripped apart. Scientists even called this effect "spaghettification", although this only applies to the event horizon inside the black hole, not the orbiting accretion disk around it. From a distance, the gravity of a black hole is no different than that of any other massive body like a star. See also [[Analysis/GravitySucks Analysis]] for cases on when this trope does not apply and when it does.

* The logical (illogical) extension of this occurs in ''Disney/TreasurePlanet''. The absence of gravity is the presence of antigravity. When the ship's gravity generators fail, everything falls up immediately -- and continues to accelerate upwards, even if it isn't touching anything else. [[FridgeLogic Which begs the question of why they didn't just build everything on the ceiling and forgo the gravity generators.]]

** In the 2009 ''Film/StarTrek'' film, Kirk, Sulu and [[WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy Ensign Ricky]] drop straight down toward Vulcan's surface as soon as they jump out of the shuttlecraft.

** A strange example in ''The Last Jedi'', is at the beginning when the rebels mount a bombing run on an attacking Star Destroyer. The bombers have bomb racks straight out of WWII, in which the bomb bay doors open and the unguided bombs simply drop onto the target. In space.

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* In ''{{Dragonball}}'', the gravity from King Kai's miniature planet, which manages to be at 10 times the gravity as on Earth despite its size, doesn't affect anything unless it gets within a few hundred feet, then you immediately get pulled toward it. To be fair, that ''is'' in the afterlife, so there's no reason the physical laws would be the same, or even exist.[[note]]As [[https://what-if.xkcd.com/68/ this]] WhatIf article illustrates. Small but dense objects (like King Kai's planet) do display "odd" gravity near their surface due to gravity being a function of mass and distance squared to the mass's center. No, their gravity wouldn't "turn off" a short distance away, but there would be a sever gravitational gradient and tidal forces present.[[/note]]

* ''Webcomic/PerryBibleFellowship'': [[http://pbfcomics.com/comics/astronaut-fall/ "Astronaut Fall,"]] in which [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin an astronaut falls from space]]. This doesn't make any sense unless they were performing a spacewalk ''during a launch'' (i.e. before their ship reached orbit), or if he was launched away at a ridiculous relative speed (at least a few hundred meters per second). Slipping off a ship or space station in orbit would just leave him stuck in a slightly different orbit.

*** This is in fact plausible TruthInTelevision (assuming FTL travel can be considered truth). A ship flying into the star system would not exit warp in a stable orbit (of either the star or any of its planets). Significant delta-v would need to be applied to match orbital velocities, and thus the ship would continue along straight non-orbital paths. Also considering the fact the ship unexpectedly dropped out of faster-than-light travel, FridgeLogic implies it could still have significant carry-over momentum that would allow it to close the Moon-To-Earth distance much faster than the 2-3 days Apollo Astronauts took.

* In ''Film/TheLastStarfighter'', Alex knocks out the engine of the Ko-Dan command ship and a nearby moon does the rest. See the page quote.

* In ''Film/TheLastStarfighter'', Alex knocks out the engine of the Ko-Dan command ship and a nearby planet does the rest:
-->'''Ko-Dan Lieutenant:''' Star Drive out. Thrusters out. We're caught in the planet's gravitational pull. ''What do we do?''
-->'''Ko-Dan Captain:'''(matter-of-factly) We die.

* Actually averted in the ''Franchise/StarWars'' [[StarWarsExpandedUniverse Expanded Universe]] novel ''Vector Prime'', where the weird gravity device used by the [[ScaryDogmaticAliens Yuuzhan Vong]] to ColonyDrop Sernpidal's moon onto the planet does not cause a "sucking" effect, but instead the moon's orbit decays more or less realistically every time it passes over the device. Not that there's anything realistic about a superweapon that produces a gravitational force greater than a planet's.

** A strange example in ''The Last Jedi'', is at the beginning when the rebels mount a bombing run on an attacking Star Destroyer. The bombers have bomb racks straight out of WWII, in which the bomb bay doors open and the unguided bombs simply drop onto the target. <i>In space</i>.

* In ''{{Defense of the Ancients}}'', the Enigma's Black Hole LastDiscMagic LimitBreak acts like the stereotypical black hole, sucking stuff towards itself.

* Justified in Creator/AndreNorton's ''Sargasso of Space'', where the entire planet was turned by ThePrecursors into a superweapon capable of generating a very powerful gravity-like field that pulls spaceships from afar (possibly even from hyperspace) and crashes them on the surface of the planet.

* ''{{Recca}}'' has [[http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/recca/recca-15.png this boss]] who fires out two kinds of gravity wells, blue ones which suck your ship towards them and white ones that repel your ship. This is an NES game...

* In ''{{Dragonball}}'', the gravity from King Kai's miniature planet, which manages to be at 10 times the gravity as on Earth despite its size, doesn't affect anything unless it gets within a few hundred feet, then you immediately get pulled toward it. To be fair, that ''is'' in the afterlife, so there's no reason the physical laws would be the same, or even exist.

Obviously not TruthInTelevision. Gravity is what allows stable orbits to exist -- without gravity, Earth would just fly away from the Sun (disregarding for a minute that without gravity, both would fail to form in the first place). Even increasing gravity, until a certain point, would not cause an orbiting body to fall onto the planet, but would simply shift it to a different orbit.

* As in the Film examples, Star Destroyers in the ''Star Wars {{Rogue Squadron}}'' series are prone to make sudden vertical 90-degree turns as soon as they're critically damaged; Rogue Leaders who aren't careful during the Battle of Endor will suddenly find the Star Destroyer they'd disabled [[YetAnotherStupidDeath swooping forward to crash into them]].

* Actually averted in the ''StarWars'' [[StarWarsExpandedUniverse Expanded Universe]] novel ''Vector Prime'', where the weird gravity device used by the [[ScaryDogmaticAliens Yuuzhan Vong]] to ColonyDrop Sernpidal's moon onto the planet does not cause a "sucking" effect, but instead the moon's orbit decays more or less realistically every time it passes over the device. Not that there's anything realistic about a superweapon that produces a gravitational force greater than a planet's.
* Deconstructed in RobertAHeinlein’s ''Starman Jones'':

* In ''[[SkylarkSeries The Skylark of Space]]'', [=DuQuesne's=] ship is caught in the pull of a dead star. Notably it induces a sickening sensation of ''falling'' even though the characters are now used to freefall.

* In the finale of ''Manga/JojosBizarreAdventure: Battle Tendency'', a volcanic eruption sends [[spoiler:Kars and Joseph]] hurtling upward into space. The latter falls back down to Earth, but the slight velocity increase from a vent of gas sent the former ''hurtling into infinite space''.