Astronauts on the International Space Station have had their own run-ins with micrometeorites, too. Last year, one slammed into one of the station’s giant windows. “Micrometeroid and orbital debris (MMOD) impacts are part of life in low Earth orbit,” says Space Safety Magazine. “MMOD impacts occur all the time on ISS and other spacecraft, although most are not easily visible through a window. Returning Space Shuttles have shown pock marks from high velocity MMODs.” As humans enter low-Earth orbit with increasing regularity, the threat posed by small bits of space debris—an errant bolt, say—goes up.

To protect satellites and astronauts (and soon, space tourists), engineers have to give the ships some sort of armor. Right now, NASA uses something called “Whipple Shielding”:

In the 1940s, Fred Whipple proposed a meteoroid shield for spacecraft, called the Whipple shield in recognition of his contribution. The Whipple shield consists of a thin, aluminum “sacrificial” wall mounted at a distance from a rear wall. The function of the first sheet or “BUMPER” is to break up the projectile into a cloud of material containing both projectile and BUMPER debris. This cloud expands while moving across the standoff, resulting in the impactor momentum being distributed over a wide area of the rear wall (Figure 2). The back sheet must be thick enough to withstand the blast loading from the debris cloud and any solid fragments that remain.

In updated versions of this design, says NASA, “bulletproof” Kevlar or other materials are placed between the outer sacrificial wall and the inside plate.

The designs amount to, essentially, putting something thick in the way that will hopefully stop the micrometeorite before it can ram its way all the way through your spacecraft. But once that hole is punctured, the strength of the shield is reduced until it can be repaired—not the greatest if you want to leave your satellite up there for years at a time, or you want your commerical space ship to do back-to-back flights. (Source)

A chip of paint at this speed in space would rip a hole in an uprotected astronot! Yet NASA has it all under control, nothing to be concerned with, we’ve done it thousands of times, logging hundreds of hours and no problema!

Gravity and Freefall.

Here NASA admits that drag plays a role at that altitude which means it would be impossible for an astronot untethered, or tethered to keep up with the ISS:

The Earth’s gravity is only slightly weaker at the altitude of the ISS than at the surface. However, objects in orbit are in a continuous state of freefall, resulting in an apparent state of weightlessness. This perceived weightlessness is disturbed by five separate effects:^[48]

• Drag from the residual atmosphere; when the ISS enters the Earth’s shadow, the main solar panels are rotated to minimise this aerodynamic drag, helping reduce orbital decay.
• Vibration from movements of mechanical systems and the crew.
• Actuation of the on-board attitude control moment gyroscopes.
• Thruster firings for attitude or orbital changes.
• Gravity-gradient effects, also known as tidal effects. Items at different locations within the ISS would, if not attached to the station, follow slightly different orbits. Being mechanically interconnected, however, these items experience small forces that keep the station moving as a rigid body.