How to propel an object, rotating freely in zero gravity, towards a collision with a fixed plane? I downloaded a model of an astronaut from the NASA website, and I'm trying to create an animation with it to import into a Premiere video project, but I'm just a beginner at Blender and am having some trouble.

So I want the astronaut to enter from off-screen, hurtling through space, spinning forward in zero gravity towards a fixed object ... think something like the monolith from 2001. I then want him to collide with the monolith and be bounced back a meter or so.

First off, I know how to keyframe an object's location to get it to move from one point to another, but I haven't figured out how to just start it in a direction and let physics do the rest. The best I've come up with is a very convoluted solution where I have a cube run into it to push it forward—but even when I do that, with gravity turned off in the Scene menu, the astronaut object does not behave naturally. It does not rotate on its axis when the cube collides with the lower half, it just moves forward without changing rotation.



So if I could give the physics of this scene to behave more naturally, I'd be thrilled. Beyond that, I would like to add an armature to the model, and have the appendages be animated throughout, though with my current bizarro setup (and after selecting the mesh, the armature, and pressing Ctrl+P "Parent with automatic weights"), the mesh gets knocked clear off the armature:



If anyone could advise me on this problem, or point me to an existing thread on this topic, I'd appreciate it—thanks!
Put the origin at the bottom or at the top.
then it will rotate as you want to achieve