Gravity Without Weight: Freefall to What?

Gravity Without Weight: Freefall to What? is a forward-facing Phase Compatibility gravity paper replacing the earlier document Gravity, Constraint, and the Loss of Degrees of Freedom. The paper accepts the conventional observational account of orbital weightlessness: gravity remains active in orbit, while astronauts, spacecraft, scales, and nearby objects share the same orbital condition and ordinary scale weight is not locally registered. It then asks a narrower interpretive question: if the condition is called “freefall,” then freefalling to what? The paper’s central distinction is between gravitational/source relation and registered weight. Registered weight is defined as the support force recorded by a scale or experienced through a material boundary. In orbit, the local measuring system does not supply an independent support boundary, so ordinary registered weight disappears even though the gravitational/source relation remains active. Phase Compatibility Theory translates this condition as continuous basin-phasing without local support registration. The paper retains conventional Newtonian and relativistic geometry as observer-level descriptions. It does not reject NASA’s freefall explanation, orbital mechanics, general relativity, or universal free fall. Instead, it reclassifies force/fall/orbit/weight language as observer-level geometry arising from a deeper phase relation. The interpretive rule is: movement is not fundamental; movement is how changing phase relation appears in observer-level geometry. The gravity-branch status is also updated. The inverse radial scaling is no longer treated as an arbitrary input in the programme: bounded phase-mathematical support for the quadratic branch q=2q = 2q=2 is incorporated. The remaining gravity-source target is U = GM. Current source-side work treats U as a candidate expression of available-phase deficit, supported by the PAV-01 gravity-blind phase-availability pilot and by a differential bridge placing strong bounds on any simple availability-to-source drift. The paper makes explicit boundaries. It does not introduce a new gravitational force, modify existing physical law, derive GGG, derive absolute planetary GMGMGM, derive a phase-native metric, or claim any origin-, composition-, biological-history-, or test-body-dependent deviation from universal free fall. PAV-01 is used only as evidence that phase availability can be extracted and shown to vary over observer time before any gravity comparison is opened; it is not treated as a measurement of GMGMGM change. This version replaces the earlier degrees-of-freedom gravity framing with the current phase-first formulation: gravity does not disappear in space; registered weight does.keyword: Phase Compatibility, gravity, freefall, microgravity, registered weight, apparent weight, support force, basin relation, local basin resolution, continuous basin-phasing, observer-level geometry, U = GM, gravitational source amplitude, inverse-square scaling, q = 2, phase availability, available-phase deficit, PAV-01, universal free fall, orbital mechanics, gravity interpretation