Sun-Earth-Moon Gravity

You might find that this all makes a lot more sense intuitively if you consider two artificial satellites orbiting the earth, an international space station and the space shuttle, for example. This is the identical situation to the earth and the earth's moon orbiting the sun, and in their similar orbit around the sun, then orbiting around each other. Lets say that the shuttle and the ISS are both 200 Kms above the earth and 1 Km from each other, and that the shuttle weighs 20,000 Kgms and the ISS 200,000 Kgms. The shuttle and the ISS both orbit around the earth about once every 90 minutes. But they also orbit around each other. Can you calculate the earth=shuttle, the earth-ISS, and the shuttle-ISS forces and from that, determine the orbital period of the shuttle and the ISS around each other? Do astronauts need to consider these motions when docking?

If gravity were due to (massive) objects displacing space, then those objects would be pushing each other away - gravity would be repulsive. The 'amount' of space between objects, which is just the way we measure how far apart they are, would increase if more objects were thrown into the pool, displacing some of that space. So, you need to petition the government for funds to do some experiments to test this predicted result of your theory: that gravity is repulsive. You would stand a pretty good chance of winning an Ignoble prize.

Shortly after Newton's work was published, a 'how' theory of gravity was proposed. This theory stated that space is full of invisible particles zinging around at high speed. These particles are constantly bombarding large bodies, like the earth, moon, etc. and bouncing off of them, thus exerting a constant pressure on them. If a body is in isolation, the pressure is the same from all directions and there is no net effect or motion. But if two bodies are near each other, they 'shadow' each other from the bombarding particles on the side of each body facing the other body, while the number of particles bombarding the opposite side is not diminished so that there is a net imbalance of force pushing the two bodies towards each other. This force has exactly the 1/RxR (one over R squared) dependency as Newton"s law! Of course, this explanation just replaced the "why is there gravity" question with a "why are there these particles" question, but since the answer to the latter question is self evident, this would still be a major advance in our understanding. This explanation was discarded for a variety of reasons, but google on "Casimir force" for a more recent application where it works quite well.

Now all you have to do is put paper and pencil where your mouth is: show that your theory predicts the observed elliptic orbits of the planets and their moons. Be sure to show all your work so that your analysis can be followed, understood, and verified by anyone with the proper background. The currently accepted Newton/Einstein theories predict these orbits to within parts per trillion, so you'll need a calculator with lots of digits.Or am I just too dense to know when my leg is being pulled?