Gadgetory

I've been surrounded by spaceflight my whole life but the only real way to know what space is like is to go there unfortunately NASA hasn't picked me for its next astronaut class but I've got a ticket for the next best thing meet the Vomit Comet well that's just its nickname it's a plane that does parabolic flight to simulate zero-g I should probably not buy them but first I wanted to know what to expect so I turn to an expert for help my mom first time but my boss Brian Moore's told me she got to fly on an old plane that NASA used to own that did zero-g in order to test out new technologies for space don't suddenly try to do a whole bunch of jumping around and swinging around right away get yourself keep your head still okay so what we're the name of the drug they gave you I don't know but I can tell you what they gave me all right well thank you for your advice and terrifying forecasting mom I love you well that was helpful at that point there wasn't much more to do but we are headed to the place where we're gonna make all of my astronaut dreams come true a Newark Airport I've been thinking about it for so long and we're getting so close but I haven't put two and two together that we're actually going to do this today I think once we're on the plane then the butterflies will start to set in parabolic flights have been used in the past to prepare astronauts from what microgravity will feel like and these days is also used to give civilians a taste of astronaut life now that we're on the bus I'm just mildly pretty cowardly alright sorry it's a plane so the flight breakdown was like this can you tell I was really excited Martian gravity just made everything feel so easy so of course the first thing to do is something that sucks here on earth I promise I do actually work out so now we're at one-sixth gravity or lunar gravity and it really felt like the plane was slipping away from me okay so before we go fully 0g you got to understand how this all works the planes flying in these parabolas or basically it does a series of peaks and valleys as the plane climbs it starts to slow down before reaching the top of the peak the entire plane and everyone inside shift into freefall that's when you experience zero-g it's a bit like the floating feeling you get when you're on a roller coaster that's zooming over a large hill just imagine when you float to the top of a pool except without the water and you move just slightly and the floor immediately becomes the ceiling the entire room is changing perspective all the time at first it's really disorienting and if you get going in one direction it's hard to recover luckily there were some ropes to grab on to heck even the astronauts on the space station have to learn to get a grip just to do their jobs there are foot restraints all over the ISS so that the crew doesn't float away while performing delicate lab work my job was just to not crash into the back of the plane so you may be wondering why they keep yelling feet down well these weightless experiences only lasts around 22 seconds and you gotta get on the floor as the plane starts to speed up on its descent as the plane does a valley you then pull extra G's 1.8 to be exact imagine feeling like someone is pressing down on all the parts of your body this may seem like the boring part of the trip but being able to sustain extra G's is another part of being an astronaut when you ride on the Soyuz you pull about 3 to 4 G's during launch and then 5 G's maybe even eight during the descent back to earth but of course the fun part is the floating and after I got the hang of it I tried to do some tricks I was weirdly obsessed with flipping thanks to my preparation though I didn't get sick that was not the case for the rest of the flight getting sick in space is a very real problem to an astronaut's first get to orbit many deal with something called space adaptation syndrome as the body's sense of balance adapts to microgravity after 15 parabolas the experience definitely started to take its toll and when the pilot said we were done I was kind of relieved and I couldn't wait to tell my mom that I'm better at space than she is he's so glad I finally got a taste of what bean and zero gravity really feels like even if it was for just 22 seconds at a time but maybe that's enough to send me into orbit now