G Force One

Last Friday I got to be weightless for the 4th time in my life. (The first time was pre-blogging, but here’s the second and third.) This time was a little disappointing — not because of the flight itself, but because of my role.

I was a self-described “technical mentor without a team.” The college team I was assigned to work with ended up not being quite ready to come to Houston to fly this time, so I had no one to work with. The Reduced Gravity Office was kind enough to let me come out and fly anyway, since I’d put a lot of time into helping the team before they were withdrawn — but none of the teams really needed any help! I was feeling really dumb for even being there, as cool as zero g flight is, but finally one of the teams (a collaborative effort between NASA and Clear Creek High School) took pity on me and said “we’ll take her.” Whew!

It turns out that I was actually of use after all, since two of the three team members immediately got sick — and by sick, I mean Jen levels of sick. (When I flew on the Vomit Comet for the very first time as a Georgia Tech student with Jen, Becca, and Karen, Jen felt so miserable that I still remember her saying that she was ready to jump out the window — with or without a parachute.) They were whisked off to the back of the plane where they remained strapped in their seats for the rest of the flight, periodically throwing up. Yeah, fun stuff. Fortunately, I was able to help the last man standing and hopefully they got some data for their experiment.

NASA is now contracting out all of the zero gravity flights to the Zero G Corporation, a private company that offers weightless flights to paying customers, so we flew on their modified Boeing 727 instead of NASA’s C9. There was no noticable difference in the layout or operation of the plane, but it was much more nicely decorated on the outside. 🙂