> I've never heard a sci-fi story mention gravitomagnetism. Out of curiosity, what would you want from the story? Astronaut in mid-altitude polar orbit around

> I've never heard a sci-fi story mention gravitomagnetism. Out of curiosity, what would you want from the story? Astronaut in mid-altitude polar orbit around Earth notices at the end of a few [...thousand...] years that the vacuum-freefalling fuzzy dice art piece in the cockpit finally shows a different face to the entry hatch? Spooky stuff! ;) A low altitude polar orbit around a millisecond pulsar would certainly allow for plot twists (pardon the pun), but effects highlighted by the GEM formalism would be way down the list of post-Newtonian observables (and in any case you'd be far from the weak field limit in which the GEM formalism is reasonably reliable). Rather than cast about in the GEM formalism for ideas when departing dramatically from a slow stable orbit around a rotating spherical body, you might be happier going down the Equivalence Principle route directly, thinking about a pseudo-gravitational field popping up in response to acceleration. Michael Weiss's text at the link might give you some ideas: http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/TwinParadox/twin_gr.html http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/Twin... The rough sketch based on that is that an astronaut bouncing around in his reentry capsule, absent any view of the interactions between the outside of the capsule and the atmosphere, is free to think of the pseudo-forces he feels (he and the capsule both want to keep freely falling, but the capsule keeps interacting with the atmosphere, jostling the capsule around his free-fall trajectory) as pseudo-gravitational, much like riders of a vomit comet, roller coaster, fast car making a sharp turn, etc. and their experiences of changing weight. (Weight in the "contact" sense: the quantities piezo-electric bathroom scales would report if slipped between human body parts and surfaces bolted/welded to the inside of the capsule/car/roller-coaster/vomit-comet, with those scales essentially quantifying the feelings arising from stimulation of their skins' various sensory receptors like Merkel nerve endings and Pacini corpuscles). As a complete aside (I was thinking of dynamic neutral buoyancy for astronauts in your proposed situation, so fish came up), Kerbal probably doesn't simulate anything like the observations in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/k0bdu/would_fish_in_an_aquarium_in_a_0_gravity/ https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/k0bdu/would_fis... and really you should be able to send simulated octopus astronauts on missions!