Defying Gravity: Eye-Opening Science Adventures On a Weightless Flight (Photos)

Before I left for Houston to go on a weightless flight, I explained to my mother how the escape from gravity works: The plane flies a series of parabolas. From an altitude of about 20,000 feet (6,100 meters), the aircraft quickly ascends maybe another 20,000 feet into the sky and then plummets. It climbs and drops over and over again 30 times creating short periods of weightlessness at the crest.

"What if you really, really don't like it? Can't they stop?" she asked, her face turning grim.

For those who hate flying, this path might sound like a nightmare. But for people who grew up envying astronauts, as I did, a weightlessmight be the next best thing to space travel and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to study some aspect of life away from Earth. Last month, I shadowed a group of undergraduates from the University of California, San Diego who defied gravity in the name of science. The experience was both euphoric and eye-opening, though I'm still finding it difficult to describe the totally alien sensation of weightlessness. [See Photos from the Weightless Flight]

A competitive NASA program

The team was among dozens of ambitious students across the United States who gathered at Ellington Field in Houston after spending the last several months preparing an experiment to fly aboard the plane as part of NASA's Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program, which uses flights by the commerical Zero Gravity Corporation (ZERO-G Corp.) to perform weightless science.

The program is competitive. Of the 50 detailed proposals submitted last year, just 18 were selected to participate in one of the 2014 flights, said program manager Frank Prochaska. During our flight week in April, there were students from Stanford and Caltech testing how a heart monitor would work on a dummy. There was a Dartmouth crew investigating how the eye changes in a zero-gravity environment. The UCSD students I was following were lighting small fires in a triple-contained acrylic box to measure how four different biofuels burnwithout gravity.

"The future of this country and this world is going to involve reduced gravity," Prochaska said. "It's going to involve space and engineering projects in a reduced-gravity environment, and that is something that not a lot of people have experience with. These students have the opportunity to be able to engineer something for that environment and to experience it themselves."

In Prochaska's eyes, the experience of weightlessness is more than a reward for all the nights and weekends the students gave up to work on their experiments.

"As soon as they feel it for the first time, you can see the light bulbs going off in their head like, 'Oh man, I should have redesigned this' it's immediate learning," Prochaska said. "I think a program like this is really going to be integral to raising America's engineers."

Led by Sam Avery, a senior in UCSD's aerospace engineering department bound for graduate school at Stanford, the team was made up of eight people: two ground support crew members and two teams of three fliers. Prone to settling arguments with equations, the students were focused in the days leading up to their flights. They spent hours inside a hanger at Ellington Field, calibrating their experiment and practicing how they would manipulate the buttons and switches on a control panel during each short period of microgravity. As their team journalist, I had the plum job of observer.