Micro-gravity Environment?

I've covered the zero gravity misconception in the past on this blog. The misconception states that once you are above Earth's atmosphere you are weightless. You may feel zero-g, but there is still a force of gravity acting on you. Much to my surprise, my daily astronomy fact calendar gets this wrong.

This daily fact states that you are not weightless, which is correct. The problem is it states you are nearly weightless. Not true. It depends on your distance from Earth. The farther away you are, the lesser the gravitational force, and the more weightless you become. But it takes a greater distance than you may think to be nearly weightless. Take the Hubble Space Telescope, in orbit about 350 miles above the surface of Earth. I won't work through the math here, so you'll have to trust me a bit, but although it is true the force of gravity acting on you is less, it's still significant. The acceleration of gravity due to Earth at this altitude is about 3-4 times less than on the surface of Earth. That's quite a bit, but it also means you are far from weightless. A greater distance is needed to be considered nearly weightless. If you weigh 150 pounds on Earth, on the HST you'd weigh, based on Earth's gravitational force at this distance, closer to 40ish pounds.

The rest of the daily fact about falling to Earth, but missing Earth, is all true. I just don't like the 'weightless-well almost' part of it because that isn't really true.