I've ridden on the Vomit Comet (well, I'm sure they've gotten a new plane since then; it was 1999).
One of the Perks of Growing Up in Texas
I grew up in Beaumont, TX, 70 miles from Houston. My high school's Spanish teacher was good friends with some NASA guys, and got our school a slot in the "Texas Fly High" program, where four kids from a school would get to fly on the Vomit Comet and use the periods of freefall to do some sort of experiment.
One week in March, a chartered bus full of 9th through 11th graders stopped at a motel outside Clear Lake, TX. For the next four days we took tours of the Johnson Space Center. I got to see the huge tank where astronauts practice their missions underwater. I climbed inside the frame of the under-construction
X-38. I sat in both the original Mission Control from the 60s and the modern one.
I learned that NASA really
does plan for everything. It was 1999, so things were still on paper, and they showed us a stack of binders with scenarios of things that could 'go wrong.' One that had actually cropped up was lights in the shuttle cabin inexplicably turning on and off, without any action by the crew. They ran through lists of what could be the problem, until they found one "things go wrong" scenario an engineer had envisioned: a ball bearing got loose, and intermittently drifted behind a panel and completed a circuit to turn on the lights.
I went into a hangar where they'd assembled a complete duplicate of the International Space Station, including modules that wouldn't be attached for a year or two.
They put us in a pressure chamber to simulate a plane decompressing at 30,000 feet, and gave us oxygen masks, and a worksheet with a word jumble and connect the dots puzzle. Then we took our masks off, and got to see just how quickly our brains shut down without oxygen. I couldn't finish connecting the dots of the sailboat.
Flight Preparations
So after a few days of getting to see the inside of NASA, it was my time to fly. They gave us dramamine for motion sickness, and told us stats of how many professional fighter pilots still puke on this thing. They stuck us in a green jumpsuit that had a ton of pockets, and every pocket had a vomit bag. There was a pocket on your shin, I guess so if you were in a fetal position, you could pull one out before you blew chunks that would drift through the air weightlessly.
And then they gave my friend David and me the workbench.
I've seen it since then. It's the blue plate of metal on the right side of this video. [video=youtube;vX-5n_YcxgQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX-5n_YcxgQ[/video]
Here's another look, though I think this is a newer version and bigger:
The blue piece folded with four panels, and the two silvery arms attach to the wall of the station and let you lock it down, or swing it out for use. A lot of divots let you slot in things so they won't drift away. When disassembled, it's about a meter long by 20 cm thick, with the arms tucked in tight.
Our 'experiment' was to assemble the device in freefall and attach it to a mockup of the ISS wall, and then spin a gyroscope on it.
Lift Off
Around 9 in the morning the KC-135 "Vomit Comet" took off and flew toward the Gulf of Mexico. On board, me and my friend David, a dozen or so students from other schools, the pilots, four NASA staff to answer questions, and a film crew from some local ABC station.
Once we were over the Gulf and out of anyone else's flight path, the pilots flew ten
parabolas. Each parabola was about thirty seconds of steep ascent at 2Gs up to over 30,000 feet, then an arcing downward dive into thirty seconds of free fall representing 0G. After that cycle, they'd do a two minute long bank to turn around and repeat the process heading back to shore. Ten more parabolas. Bank and head out over the Gulf again. Ten
more. Bank one last time, and the final ten.
Forty in total.
The first time the plane dives, everyone is giddy. You float and drift. Your arms wobble in the air. They told us to not bother with the experiments yet. Just use the time to get a feel for floating, and to practice moving with your hands, and using your toes to hook onto the loops on the floor.
I got excitable and was looking at everyone, and I may have released a long "oooooh" when one of the NASA guys did an aerial somersault with practiced ease.
Then your limbs grow heavy, your stomach slams into your intestines, and you slump against the wall to distribute your weight better as the plane pulls up into a 2G ascent. For thirty seconds it feels like someone has put a sack of sand on your head. The anticipation builds. And then like a miracle the weight vanishes, and again you're flying.
If any of you do this, a big piece of advice: don't spin around.
See, the hairs in your ear help your brain know which way is down. In free fall, they kinda all float in any direction, so your brain can ignore the inconclusive data. But if you spin, the hair in one ear will think down is one direction, and the other ear will think down is the opposite direction. Those
two pieces of data confuse the **** out of your brain. Since we aren't evolved for 0G, the only reasonable explanation it can come to is, "OMG WE HAVE BEEN POISONED. QUICKLY, EVACUATE ALL CONTENTS OF THE STOMACH!"
Wherein I Become a Tiny Vomit Comet All My Own
On parabolas two through ten, my friend David and I pulled out the folded workbench and systematically removed arm 1, attached it, removed arm 2, attached it, unfolded the bench, tried to seat it, quickly failed when it became twice as heavy, then got it on the second try. David then apparently attached the gyroscope, but by this point I was distracted trying to keep the world from spinning.
We finished the first set of ten parabolas, and the plane started its long bank. One of the NASA guys stomped over to me, and told me to get a bag handy, because I wasn't looking good. I managed to hold out all the way through the bank, but then on parabola eleven, as 0G gripped the plane, I floated off the ground and curled into a ball, and really appreciated that pocket in the shin of my jumpsuit.
For ten minutes I intermittently wretched while tumbling, or groaned while slumped on the ground under 2Gs. Out of the corner of my eye I was aware of David doing the experiment with the gyroscope. I don't remember what he discovered, but
I discovered that looking at a tiny spinning thing was not a good idea.
During our second bank, two NASA guys checked on me, realized I was in this for the long haul, and grabbed me under my arms. I stumbled with them to the back of the plane, where they belted me into a seat and handed me a cluster of bags. "You won't need these," one guy said, "but it'll make everyone else feel better if you have one."
The last twenty parabolas were torture. While I watched from my prison-chair, a dozen kids finished their experiments and started goofing off. They tossed footballs, did somersaults, one girl practiced ballet. Only one other person lost their lunch. The film crew lingered for what felt like an hour on a shot of my misery.
And I dry heaved. For twenty minutes.
We landed. I staggered off the plane and just sat on the tarmac for twenty minutes. I think I stayed motion sick for about 8 hours.
If you get a chance to do this, go for it! It's super fun.
