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Tonight on PBS: "Why Ships Sink"

There's the rub - it doesn't.

At the altitude of typical shuttle flights and the international space station the gravitational field strength is still 0.9g.

You have to get to an altitude of 6000km for gravity to fall off to around 0.25g, still far from microgravity - micro means 1/1000000, so how far do you have to be from earth before its force of gravity drops to 1/1000000g?

You'd have to deal with the gravity of the star, too.
 
There's the rub - it doesn't.

At the altitude of typical shuttle flights and the international space station the gravitational field strength is still 0.9g.

You have to get to an altitude of 6000km for gravity to fall off to around 0.25g, still far from microgravity - micro means 1/1000000, so how far do you have to be from earth before its force of gravity drops to 1/1000000g?

~6.4 million km. Or 0.04 AU. A very small part of any interplanetary flight.

However, if you want to be pedantic about it, you'll almost never be in microgravity in traveller, since the Jump limit is ~1/40,000th of surface gravity.

That said, in the word "microgravity", "gravity" does NOT signify one Earth gravity. Nor does "micro" signify 1/1000,000.
Do remember that "micro" was in use before SI was ever thought of. Its original meaning is just "small" (think ancient Athens for the source, though it's probably older still).
 
The popular media confused the ignorant masses using the term zero gravity when what they meant was weightless due to being in free fall.

And NASA is pretty specific about what microgravity means these days...
 
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