Zero-g Flights
When I give talks on the Cassini mission or other aspects of the space program to students or the public these days I comment that as a child I wanted to be an astronaut so I decided to get a Ph.D. in astrophysics, but what I should have done to become an astronaut is become a millionaire. This week Microsoft executive Charles Simonyi is in space as the fifth paying space tourist. At some point in the foreseeable future the number of tourist astronauts will likely exceed the number of professional astronauts. For me personally, the closest I’ll probably ever get to the experience of being in space was when I flew on NASA’s fabled “vomit comet” to conduct scientific experiments in weightless conditions.
Now that experience is also available to paying customers. For $3500 the Zero-G corporation will take you up in their modified Boeing 727 airplane for a dozen or so parabolic maneuvers that give you about 20 seconds of weightlessness each. They recently announced scheduled flights out of Las Vegas starting this month. For my own experience, the “vomit comet” lived up to its nickname. I did a total of six flights over a period of a little over a year, and a total of 247 parabolas. The longest flight was 51 parabolas, and ironically that is the only time I didn’t puke, though I was terribly nauseous most of the time. Nevertheless, the experience of weightlessness was truly memorable. Even though I was generally too queasy or too busy to do somersaults or anything showy like that, the sensation of weightlessness permeates the whole body and gives an entirely new perspective on our daily battle against gravitational acceleration. When you are weightless you become aware of the absence of forces in your body that you are not normally aware of, such as the weight of your head on your shoulders, or the pull of your arms downward and even the weight of your organs on the organs beneath them. And of course there is the odd behavior of fluids, such as spherical bubbles of water. Fluid studies are in fact a major area of research experimentation on the NASA Weightless Wonder (as it is officially known).
Here’s a rather low-quality movie of me during one parabola. It’s not very impressive because I’m holding onto a strap on the ceiling to keep from drifting away or getting turned upside down and get sick, so that diminishes the impression of floating. Those bright spots on the wall are lights, not windows. In the KC-135 plane I flew on (now retired) there are only a couple of windows. During the parabolic maneuver there is very little impression of the outside orientation of the airplane. The sickening part, by the way, at least for me, was not zero-g itself, but rather the constant cycling between zero-g and about 1.8 g’s and the havoc that wreaked on my internal organs. I found taking ginger supplements and lying flat on the floor during the 1.8 g pull-up maneuvers helped. It was a great experience (and I’m finally even getting the paper on our experimental results written for publication), but I don’t think I’ll be coughing up three and a half grand to repeat it anytime soon.