Zero Gravity Flights for the Rest of Us

waynegoode writes "Zero G Corporation, whose motto is "Question Gravity", is now offering zero gravity flights to the general public. For $3000 you get training and a 90 minute ride with 15 periods of 25 seconds of low or zero-gravity: 3 1/3 Mars gravity, 3 1/6 Lunar gravity, and 9 zero gravity. Peter Diamandis, the man behind the Ansari X Prize, worked 11 years to get FAA approval. Previously, such flights were available only to astronauts, researchers, and Tom Hanks; although recently flights for the public began Russia for about twice the price. Story also here."

Comments

First person account

[dane23]

Xeni Jardin, over at Boingboing.net has a ticket and is blogging the experience.

Re:*Ahem*

[Chris_Jefferson]

Goddamn, who rated this informative?

1) "anti-gravity space ship", what kind of rubbish is that?

2) Actually according to relativity, there is no way of distguishing between acceleration and gravity. Therefore if I put you in a sealed box and either a) leave you floating in deep space or b) put you in free fall then there is no way of you telling the difference (ok, there is as there will be slight air resistance slowing you down, and you could measure the very tiny difference in gravity between the top and bottom of the box, etc.).

There is always "c) you hit the ground" too of course :)

but seriously, this really is zero-G for all intents and purposes foras long as they can accalerate you downwards at 9.8m/s

Other private rides on the Vomit Comet

[dpilot]

Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller rode the Comet. I was even posted on Slashdot: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=115312 &cid=9770946
In Penn's article, he mentions another noteworthy Vomit Comet expedition: The filming of the Pr0n movie, "The Uranus Experiment."

Re:Other private rides on the Vomit Comet

[K8Fan]

Penn Jillette of Penn & Teller rode the Comet.

Yeah, I love that story! Here's Google's cache of it...Art Bell's web site no longer has it (apparently the gray aliens told him to take it down).

Since it's so hard to find, I might as well post the entire thing here. It's not that long:

Learning to Fly, Strip, and Vomit on a 727

Penn Jillette

Since I was a kid, I've wanted to be weightless. I really wanted to go to space, but part of going to space was being weightless. Just to hold something up in front of me, and have it stay right there is the idea of magic. As I got older, I battled gravity. My start in showbiz was as a juggler. Jugglers fight gravity. The hack jugglers cover a drop with a "standard" (meaning it's been stolen so much, those who didn't write it conveniently consider it to be public domain) 'cover' (it doesn't really cover very much, they know the prop is on the floor and they know you're chasing it, bent over like you're chasing a duck) line, "Sudden gust of gravity."

Now, that I'm 45 years old and I weight 280 pounds, gravity is a less sporting and more real enemy. I'm 6'6" tall and I still remember Leslie Fiedler writing in "Freaks, Myths of our Secret Selves" that "gravity is not kind to those who grow too large." As we get older, it seems the jockey build is healthier.

No one knows what gravity is. I mean we just don't know. There is no good theory. A good theory in science is one that we're damn sure is true: The Earth goes around the Sun. Evolution is how we got here. No one seriously doubts those. But, gravity, well, we just don't know.

So, right now, the only way you can feel weightless for more than a couple rollercoaster seconds is by getting far enough away from Earth, or taking the Vomit Comet. The Vomit Comet is how NASA trains astronauts (the Russians must do it too, right?). They take a big old airplane and they go up and down really fast. When they go up, you weight 1.8 times your weight, and when they go down, you weigh around 0.

The FAA has always given NASA a monopoly on losing all your pounds of ugly fat (along with muscle, bone, and everything else). Astronauts get to ride it, some scientists get to ride it, and that's about it. Ron Howard made some backroom deal (it MUST have included sexual favors) to be able to shoot "Apollo 13," on the NASA Vomit Comet and they talked about it a bit, but it was soon quieted down. You're not REALLY supposed to use a government-funded program to make movies. Not really. I mean, I'm glad Tom, Gary, and Kevin got to fly, but if everyone really thought about it, why can't we all ride?

A couple free-market nuts at NASA decided they LOVED Zero G, and it was time to get off the socialist tit, and buy their own Vomit Comet and start selling rides on it. Everything the Vomit Comet does in within the specs of planes, and why can't we do what Ron and Tom got to do? That was the idea.

When they first got this harebrained scheme, I heard about it. It seems that when anyone gets a harebrained scheme, I'm CC'd on the memo. I loved nuts, I'm for nuts, I am nuts. They all get in touch with me. I told them I thought it was a great idea (and you know how much that means), and I wrote them email, gave them tickets to our show, and went to dinner with them a couple times.

They were going to get approval to fly a 727 very fast right straight down very soon. It was going to be a matter of months. That was 6 years ago. But, I kept talking to them, and whenever they gave me a date, I said I would be there, until it fell through again. Us free-market guys are always fighting the man.

Well, they finally fought the law and kinda sorta won. They at least won enough for me to fly. I finally did it. After 6 years of grueling cheerleading, I got be be weightless. Only about

Slashdot Public Service Announcement

[tgd]

To avoid the possibility any other responders to this thread demonstrate a critical need to be cracked with a cluestick:

What a person experiences in this case is *identical* to what you'd experience in Space.

You don't suddenly leave the Earths gravitational field in orbit and start floating around. You just fall in a parabola that happens to miss the ground.

One would think this was common knowledge, but from the posts on here, its clearly not.

Re:Slashdot Public Service Announcement

[sleepingsquirrel]

It always seemed to me that a thrown ball, disregarding friction from the air, should describe an elliptic section corresponding to its orbit around the Earth's center of gravity, not the parabola that so often got mentioned.

The parabola arises from a simplifying assumtion that the gravity producing body is infinite in all directions (which would result in a uniform gravitational field everywhere). Stated another way, assume the highest point the projectile reaches is small compared to the radius of the earth. Kind of like the assumption that accelleration due to gravity for earth is 9.8m/s^2 (which is true as long as you are sufficiently close to the surface). Take a baseball (mass=m1) and the earth (mass=m2). The magnitude of the force on the baseball is...

F=G*m1*m2/r^2
where
G=universal gravitational constant (6.67E-11 Nm)
r=distance between center of masses of m1 and m2 (radius of earth is ~6400km)

The accelleration of m1 due to m2 is...

F=m*a
m1*a=G*m1*m2/r^2
a=G*m2/r^2

So if you throw the baseball 10 meters straight up, the gravitational field at the top of the arc will be about 3 ten thousandths of a percent less [compare (6400000)^2 with (6400000+10)^2]. That's a small error, so usually we ignore it. You might also be interested to know that a parabola is merely a degenerate ellipse with one of the foci at infinity. See also about conic sections.

Re:Odd diagram...

[pclminion]

The zero-G condition occurs when the aircraft is moving ballistically. Whether the plane is ascending or descending is irrelevant. All that matters is that it is moving in a parabolic trajectory consistent with the acceleration of gravity.

The reason the occupants of the plane experience this as a zero-G condition is because they are in freefall. They are moving precisely as they would be moving if they were falling toward the earth without air resistance. You need a plane to accomplish this, because in reality you cannot neglect the air resistance.

You can experience the same condition briefly, simply by jumping in the air. During the time you are in the air, you are in a weighless condition.