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To Boldly Go Where No Mento Has Gone Before
rjwoodhead writes "This past weekend, my entire family learned what it's like to float in freefall aboard G-Force One (recently featured on the Mythbusters' Moon Hoax show). Being science-lovers, we wanted to do some kind of original experiment. So we decided to test whether the Diet Coke & Mentos reaction was affected by the lack of bubble convection in microgravity. At the link you can find the story of how the experiment evolved and how we talked Space Adventures into letting us fool around with sticky and corrosive cola and candy inside their nice clean airplane, as well as high-speed video of the results."
A friend is a private pilot and used to have access to a Cessna 150 Aerobat. He took me up and we went into a couple of zero-G arcs. It's astoundingly cool! And in a little Cessna it was far less than a hundred dollars an hour to play around in.
Of course, this does have its drawbacks compared to the Vomit Comet. Being a tiny(!) plane, there's no space for a passenger to actually float around the cabin. I unbuckled the seat belt so I was lifted off the seat for a while. A few objects in the cabin floated around a bit. But the little Cessna cannot achieve the speeds and altitudes required to follow a zero G parabola for more than about ten seconds at a time.
Even if it could, there's a bigger problem. Fuel intake is the limiting factor. Regular planes have a rigid fuel intake inside the gas tanks near the bottom, and the fuel sits on the bottom of the tank. The Aerobat uses "clunk tanks" similar to model planes - weighted flexible hoses in the gas tanks to ensure the fuel and intake hose are on the "bottom" of the tanks even when the plane is inverted. Both types of tanks rely on gravity to keep the fuel and the intake together. Without gravity, neither the fuel nor the intake hose are under any physical obligations to meet up with each other, and the engine can run dry. That's generally considered a "bad thing."
John
I always thought the people take diet coke instead of normal coke precisely because it is not sticky, because it does not contain sugar. And I also used to believe that most of the corrosive behaviour of coke also comes from the sugar. But that's just me.
I work for a well known government agency and have flown in the C9 vomit comet (for free no less...well at least free to me). And I agree that it is definitely worth a good hunk of money. Personally I wouldn't pay it (I'm too cheap) and it's kind of annoying that ZG only does 15 parabolas (most C9 tests do 50+) but they wanted to choose a number that made it worth it to the consumer but didn't make them sick (i.e., wanting more and positive word of mouth).
I'm supposed to fly the ZG 727 sometime later this year and I look forward to the extra space (100% more volume, 50% more people) above the C9.