Blue Skies Up Above
Weightless Wonder/Vomit Comet at Ellington Field, Houston, Texas
This plane was used by Johnson Space Center to train astronauts to give them as much of a taste of weightlessness as they could before sending them into orbit. The plane would fly up and over the top of a parabolic arc, at which time everything in the cargo area would fall at the same rate, thereby simulating weightlessness. After all, what we think of as weightlessness is just that - free fall, as nothing in a gravitational field is truly weightless.
The typical training flight would fly dozens of those arcs, and most trainees could handle the first few of them. But after twenty or so, all bets were off. Hence, its nickname, the Vomit Comet.
Blue Skies Up Above
Weightless Wonder/Vomit Comet at Ellington Field, Houston, Texas
This plane was used by Johnson Space Center to train astronauts to give them as much of a taste of weightlessness as they could before sending them into orbit. The plane would fly up and over the top of a parabolic arc, at which time everything in the cargo area would fall at the same rate, thereby simulating weightlessness. After all, what we think of as weightlessness is just that - free fall, as nothing in a gravitational field is truly weightless.
The typical training flight would fly dozens of those arcs, and most trainees could handle the first few of them. But after twenty or so, all bets were off. Hence, its nickname, the Vomit Comet.