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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."
that does not seem like a long time...
of course falling from a great height it can seem like forever...
but I can just see someone trying a "cool trick" in zero G.. then the 25 secs ends and the kids lands on his head... that would be bad...
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
That's relatively affordable for the uniqueness of the experience. And hey, maybe even more affordable. Since I write science fiction novels with such low-gravity and free-fall environments, I bet I could write this off! Whoo hoo!
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Just find a road with some small hills and go fast enough to just become airborne. Always got a kick out of that as a kid in the back of my parents station wagon. May be short lived, but it's cheep!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Sky-diving offers a very very windy free-fall experience that I can't imagine is really comparable at all. Maybe it's close enough at just under 1/10 the price (locally sky diving costs about $200 in Colorado for a first-time thing).
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
Flying The Vomit Comet Has Its Ups And Downs. NOTE: article deserves props for it's title alone, but it's also very revealing about what getting to Zero G is like. Not sure if I'd want to do it, but it must be a crazy feeling.
CB(whr=1)
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Why is it that the NASA/military free-fall flights are so notorious for inducing nausea in the participants that they've been dubbed "Vomit Comet," yet you never hear about anyone getting airsick or puking during a skydive?
I've never gone skydiving before, but I have always imagined that it feels an awful lot like falling- something which I have done. I can tell you that the feeling of weightlessness is very different from the sensation of falling. Maybe falling for quite a while makes all the difference but somehow I just don't see that it would.
Finally, if you have that $3k to spend, why not invest it in a Private Pilot Certificate so you can go out and experience it for yourself whenever you have the hankering?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
But when you're in an airplane that's in a dive, the airplane is going to reach terminal velocity and stop accelerating much sooner than you are while inside the plane. In other words, relative to earth, both plane and person are getting the same acceleration force from gravity. But the plane is getting a much greater upwards drag force from all the wind.
So wouldn't the person in the plane start travelling faster than the airplane, since the airplane is shielding the person from the effects of wind?
Or maybe I need to take physics again...
They did, it was called The Uranus Experiment, and they filmed the money shots on the original vomit comet, AFAIK.
Zero-gee is when you're in completely flat space. You're not accelerating due to gravity, because there isn't any.
Free fall is when you're in bent space, and are accelerating due to gravity. The space station is falling at one gee; but it's falling sideways, and everything in it is falling at roughly the same speed, so there's very little relative acceleration between the objects on board.
Both these terms are so badly abused that microgravity tends to be used these days instead. Which is a shame, because it's just as confusing. Free fall is a much more accurate description of what's going on.
(BTW, skydivers aren't, technically, in free fall. They're falling freely, sure, but once they reach terminal velocity they're not accelerating any more.)
This is very different from skydiving and very similar to orbital flight. With typical skydiving you never actually feel a lack of acceleration force. The point is the box in this case has control surfaces and flies a parabolic arc to counter the forces of air friction, all forces of air friction are removed, and in the frame of reference inside the aircraft gravitational forces don't manifest as a perceived phenomenon. What do you think an Orbit is? It's a vehicle falling under gravity and missing the Earth because of it's velocity vector (in the Newtonian model), the two differences between this and an orbital flight are the control surfaces (and engines) on the vehicle eliminating the forces of air and the fact that the arc of motion intersects the Earth. If you call orbital flights zero-G then you should call this flight zero-G because the relevant difference air friction is eliminated with by the aircraft.
Skydiving when you exit the plane you immediately feel the force of air blasting you from the direction of flight, the speed of the aircraft is enough that this force is some significant portion of 1G, it actually feels like you're falling sideways once you're used to skydiving, skydivers call this "the hill". Eventually as you fall the forward motion is eliminated as you accelerate downwards but again it just feels like the vector from which the air is pushing you has changed. From then on you're lying on a cushion of air with a full 1G of gravity, and you feel this. Skydivers do seek the thrill of weightlessness by jumping from relatively stationary platforms, like Helicopters or Hot Air Balloons, unlike normal skydiving from an moving plane you get that lump in your throat "I'm falling" feeling for a few seconds at the start of the jump. Same with BASE jumping.
It's just that they have a rather odd diagram on there showing when the freefall periods occur. It doesn't look right to me.
It shows you get "zero g" (freefall) from the point where the aircraft starts to level off from a climb, until it starts to tip over... surely the freefall would occur from when it started to tip over until it started to pull up ?
in a glider, you can fly in zero-gravity for about 5 or 10 seconds. If you like the idea, go to the nearest airfield and ask them, it's fun. Price should be around 30 dollars for a flight for non-members. But you can't run around at zero gravity, because you'll be wearing a 4 or 5-point seat belt. (pssst... glider acrobatics are even more fun, but that varies between -2g and +5g)
Yes you can, and I find it quite fun. But there is even more fun in watching the faces of your passengers while they dodge the various pieces of debris that is laying on the cabin floor of most rental planes (chewing gum wrappers, old pencils and pens, loose change and the occasional condom package from someone's mile high club attempt). These formally forgotten items once relived of the burden of gravity that is keeping them out of sight and out of mind under feet suddenly fill the cabin of the plane like the cloud of debris around a tornado. Your passengers now overloaded with experiences totally outside of anything they have ever experienced before become totally convinced in those few seconds that the aircraft is going to pieces around them, and most become total quivering blobs of jelly while calling out loudly to their deity to save them.
Skydiving is completely unlike the feeling of zero g. The feeling of weightlessness only lasts for the first 2-3 seconds of the jump, and terminal velocity is achieved after 10-11 seconds. You don't even feel the drop after the first few jumps. After that it feels like lying face down on a waterbed. A really noisy waterbed. By rolling the shoulders in, straightening the feet, and cupping your hand by your side you can turn your body into an airfoil and actually trade some of that downward velocity for horizontal velocity. Subjectively, this feels like upward acceleration, and is an absolutely indescribable sensation.
We've actually done the free fall experience in Cessna 172's. I think all those Cessna's are rated for 0G or even -1G or more no problem. Of course, it is no where near 25 seconds long, but we were still cackling like crazy kids.
Simply fly long up and down swoops. When you arch over the top and start to descend, the pilot controls the rate so that everything in the cabin lifts up and floats. I spun my 35mm camera in front of me, hanging in the air, so you get a few seconds. Quite a rush.
I worked for a charter airline, and we were approached by someone wanting to do something like this... probably 1997ish. They wanted to take some of our cargo planes, slap some FedEx PeoplePaks in them, and have them fly these sorts of flights during the day (when cargo planes are normally idle).
The scary thing is that most cargo planes are cargo planes because they're too freakin' OLD for sane passengers to fly in.
Now, okay, I'm no aeronautical engineer, but I can't imagine taking those creaky old (many older than I am; see sig) birds and doing *anything* weird with them. The whole time I was in freefall, I'd be thinking, "okay, is this going to stop, or did the wings fall off?"
Okay, so the things would be all but unloaded, compared to hauling cargo, but still... seems like the stresses would be *different*. (Their FAQ doesn't exactly answer this straightforwardly, either.)
Hmm. Nowhere on their website am I finding the tail number for their bird. Could be one of our 727-200's, but the airline I worked for hasn't updated its website since, well, about the time I left in 1998. Oh, wait. Nope, looks like it's Amerijet N994AJ.
Heh. The reason the Zero-G website only shows the left side of the plane is because the right side is a Diet Rite ad.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
It's possible that if it was a cone, or even just a plane at the right angle, he'd be able to slide down it.
It would have to be almost 90 degrees of course, and it would have to level out so that he slows down, but if it's convex, angled correctly, steep enough for long enough at the top and shallow enough for long enough at the bottom, there's no reason (other than failure to get really, really lucky) that he couldn't survive.
Zero-g doesn't exist anywhere in our universe
How do you know? Imagine an experimental method for determining that a region of space has zero gravitational field (or zero space-time curvature, if you like). How would that method distinguish the zero curvature from free-fall?
Note, in particular, the problem of establishing a "fixed" frame of reference in space-time. Perhaps that is what Einstein was talking about when he called his theory "General RELATIVITY."
You flakes are all getting worked up into a lather about something that is nowhere near as clear-cut as you make it out to be, and a careful consideration of the facts should make that clear to you, if you spent as much effort on asking yourself difficult questions as you do lambasting others.
Note also that it is by no means obvious, for instance, that "looking out the window" of the spacecraft and seeing a planet rotating "below" you means that you are in orbit around the planet. It is only clear if you know that the thing out the window has MASS. How do you really know it has mass? Through gravity? Well, that's a circular argument, isn't it?
In fact, it is easy to imagine that you *could* set up masses around you to cancel out the gravitational fields of every other object. Putting yourself *inside* a massive spherical shell would be a good start. Then, add small lumps to the spherical shell to cancel out the residual effects of far-away bodies.
Well, not exactly for free. I put a crapload of effort into it.
I got to fly in the the Weightless Wonder (aka V**** C****) as part of a collegiate student program this past April. All told, we flew 30 micro-g parabolas, 1 lunar parabola, and 1 martian parabola. Let me say this: roller coasters, jumping cars over hills, even piloting gliders do not come close to comparing. Even when piloting an aircraft, you don't have the ability to get up and move around...there's that darn steering part to take care of.
For $3000, if the track record and maintenence records are clean, I would definitely do it again (granted I plan ahead for this as simply an expensive vacation). Especially since I won't have to be preoccupied with any experiments.
Might I suggest: anyone who is in a science-based major in college should try to come up with an experiment that would yield "intriguing" results when flown in microgravity. Remember, each trial must last a maximum of 25 seconds. And the more hands-off (and more automated), the better...that just means more fun for you.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
Well, that's one pretty slick web site, the only problem is that it is complete bogus. To the best of my knowledge they have never actually flown a flight, nor can you make a reservation for one. In addition, their whole pitch is really bizarre...sounding like something out of a bad SF movie. Aside from the fact that they just couldn't deliver the experience they describe, their whole thing about 'relaxing' in zero-g is completely ass-backwards! The real ZERO-G experience is unbelievably neat, but 'relaxing' it sure isn't!
(On the other hand, the ice hotel whose picture they show (and where your 'xero' experience begins) is actually rather cool [ouch!] That's another experience worth doing, but probably only once, so you can say you've done it. Sleeping on a reindeer hide on a block of ice is doable, but you don't exactly get a good night's sleep!)
(and yes, I've both stayed in the Ice Hotel and flown on the ZERO-G flight...)