Flying on the Vomit Comet

Well, I did it. I finally did it. After working at NASA for over five years, I had the chance to ride the KC-135 (AKA the Vomit Comet). Of course, I jumped at the opportunity. How did I become involved with flying? There is a new program called Texas Fly High where high school students from around the state have the opportunity to do experiments in zero-gravity. NASA employees (that's me!) act as mentors during the pre-flight preparation and actually fly with the students. My high school group was trying to assemble a workbench that the astronauts will be using on the International Space Station. They were recording how easy/hard it was to install and how many people were needed to set it up. After they assembled it, they had an experiment in which they were trying to determine the mass of an object by looking at its momentum.

So what was it like being in zero-gravity? In a word -- weird. I never understood, or believed when the astronauts said there was no "up" or "down". How could there be no up or down? Impossible! But when your legs are floating sideways despite your best attempts to keep them out in front of you, and when you watch people and things float around at every angle, suddenly the reality you've accepted all your life doesn't seem to fit. After all, it isn't "normal" to see someone floating upside down above your head. And my normal reality didn't include watching my stopwatch float off my neck or having pens seemingly hover in midair.

Is it like being in space? Some astronauts that I have talked to say, "Not really." Yes, you have periods of weightlessness, but it lasts only 15-20 seconds. Then you suddenly feel twice as heavy as normal while the plane climbs back up in the sky and you experience 2-g's. Repeat this about 40 times, and you have a typical KC-135 flight.

Anyway, the question EVERYONE asks when you fly on the KC-135 is, "Did it live up to its nickname - the Vomit Comet?" Well, include me in on the 10 out of 14 people on my flight who would emphatically say, "YES!"