system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why, when spaceships lose power do their orbits decay so fast that a crash in to the planet below is an immediate future prospect?

As far as I know it actually takes effort to get out of orbit. So a broken engine should just mean you're stuck.

Right?
gpt
Yeah, but a stable orbit like this is inconvienent. What if you want to do detailed scans of one area, for example? You want to be low, but also to stay over one point on the surface. Orbital mechanics disagress with that, so the solution is to simply continuously use your engines rather than your orbital velocity to counteract gravity. That's a ludicrous idea with our terrible chemical rockets, but if your propulsion is good enough, it's a reasonable thing to do.

One downside is that when your engine fails, you start falling.