The Unbearable Lightness of Being Weightless

By | September 15, 2004
5 Comments

As the age of space tourism draws ever closer, some some would-be amateur astronauts are likely to prepare themselves by taking one or more zero G flights, which are about to be offered on a commercial basis:

The Zero Gravity Corporation has been given the thumbs up by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to conduct “weightless flights” for the general public, providing the sensation of floating in space.

Tickets are on sale for around $3,000.

A specially modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft, called G-Force One, will be used during a nationwide tour Sept. 14-24.

Once they’re offered to the general public, zero-G flights will run passengers about $3000. According to the linked article, passengers will first experience reduced gravity, approximating the surfaces of Mars and the Moon, before experiencing absolute weightlessness. It’s hard not to wonder how long the flights will last (the article doesn’t say.) At $3000 a ride, I wonder how much the passengers will be paying for each second of weightlessness?

  • http://microgravityuniversity.jsc.nasa.gov/students/theProgram/generic_schedule.cfm cdhall

    the link goes to NASA’s Reduced Gravity Flight Opportunities program generic schedule. this student program is pretty cool: groups of students design an experiment and go fly it on NASA’s KC 135 (an AF version of Boeing 707). As it states on the site:

      Each flight will last an average of 60 to 80 minutes, and will fly approximately thirty, zeroG parabolic maneuvers over the Gulf of Mexico . The trajectory flown on each zeroG parabolic maneuver will provide approximately 25 seconds of zero-gravity conditions for each team’s experiment. At the end of the zeroG maneuvers, teams/experiments are also treated to approximately 30 seconds of lunar-g (1/6-g) and approximately 40 seconds of Martian-g (1/3-g).

    I expect the commercial venture will be something similar.

  • cdhall

    ahh, the UnorderedList html tags didn’t work.

  • AndrewS

    I had heard of them before and have been waiting for them to actually start selling tickets but I hadn’t realized that Peter Diamandis (of X-Prize fame) was also in charge of Zero Gravity Corporation.

  • https://www.blog.speculist.com Phil Bowermaster

    Chris,

    I have activated html tags in the comments. Thanks for the heads up.

  • http://www.speculist.com Stephen Gordon

    Er, the unbearable expense of lightness!

    Oh well…like everything else, if it catches on the price will drop. This is like skydiving for those who don’t like leaving an airplane in flight

    I heard that one of the reasons NASA used this method to train astronauts at the beginning of the space program was that they wanted to be sure the astronauts could psychologically handle the weightless feeling. Apparently there was some fear that once weightless the astronauts would have a constant feeling of falling and would freak out.

    That really hasn’t been a problem though.

    Did you guys know that Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 was filmed this way? I’m guessing this makes it the first major motion picture to use actual zero g during production.