photo: a young girl dreams of flying in outer space

Walking in Outer Space (Sort of)

Growing up means coming to terms with a lot of difficult truths. You will probably never be Miss America. Or President. Or an astronaut. Actually, let’s not scratch off that last one just yet…

Even those off us who failed high school physics can now see what it’d be like to walk around in space by taking a ride on the G-Force One, a Boeing 727 designed to give its passengers — 27 at a time — the sensation of weightlessness. The plane is owned by the Zero Gravity Corporation and operates out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

photo: women experiencing weightlessness

Flip, walk on your hands, watch your hair stand on end.

Until two years ago, NASA-operated flights like these had only ever been for astronauts, scientists, and perhaps the occasional movie crew (Apollo 13 was shot in a zero-gravity plane, as were parts of The Matrix).

But aerospace engineer Peter Diamandis, the Chairman of the X-Prize Foundation and the cofounder of the International Space University , decided in the mid-nineties that the experience of weightlessness was too amazing not to share with everyone.

To create zero gravity, the plane makes a series of 10 to 15 parabolas — upside-down U's — over the period of about a half hour. The weightlessness is created at the top of the arc. The force of the turn of the upward arc will pull you to the top of the plane, much as you get pushed to the side of a car when it makes a sharp turn; gravity, however, counters and negates the force pulling you up, and the result is weightlessness. Got that, Einstein? Each parabola takes about 90 seconds to complete, and 30 of those seconds are spent weightless. It’s enough time to flip, walk on your hands, watch your hair stand on end, soar around the plane like Superman, and maybe get a little sick….

Posted on January 02, 2006