zero G
....to slip the surly bonds of Earth....
"Five minutes to first parabola" barked the cabin loudspeaker - muffled by the white noise of airliner flight. We scrambled to get ready - the utter uncertainty of what I was about to experience and how I would react loomed in front of me and sent giant butterflies flapping about inside me.
Almost
everyone I'd spoken to who'd flown these stomach churning flights before had
been sick. The yo-yoing of the aircraft - pushing us alternately close to zero
G at the top of the parabolas and then into a neck crushing 1.8 G - so called
"hyper-gravity" - at the start and end of each arc, can play havoc with the
balance fluids in your inner ears.
Even Apollo 11's Michael Collins, who'd had to fly more of these manoeuvres than any other astronaut in his job testing the early space suits had admitted to feeling rather queasy.
I only had my uncomfortable experiences on fairground rides to go on, and the childhood memories of throwing up on ferries to gage how thirty-one gut wrenching parabolas might make me feel. I chewed hard on the gum I'd blagged off one of the passengers - trying to forget about the imminent nausea.
At our base height of 20,000 ft we were still buried in turbulent clouds over the Bay of Biscay and Captain Giel Mardic took us further north and west in search of cleaner air. Turbulence is the last thing you want when trying to fly these magic manoeuvres which suspend gravity for a tantalising twenty seconds.
As Professor Wubbo Ockels, the Dutch astronaut who was flying with us had pointed out - living without gravity was a more natural state to be in. "There are more places in the Universe with less than the one G that binds everything to Earth. And when you experience it - you too will realise what a relaxing and comfortable state it is" said Wubbo. He'd flown into space on board Space Shuttle Challenger in 1985 on the ESA Spacelab mission - spending a week in this idyllic state - unencumbered by invisible Gs.
It
was a state he seemed to revel in and managed to taste it again each year on
board these European Space Agency student parabolic flights which he lead.
This was their fifth year flying out of Bordeaux on a modified Airbus A-300
which bragged of its unusual mission in the vast black words "Zero G"
emblazoned down its brilliant white fuselage.
There were seats at each end of the plane for take off and landing, but the central part is reserved for experiments and experimenters - all chasing that illusive environment when gravity all but disappears and the conditions of space travel are approached.
A voice declared that we had just begun the first steep climb - but we were already well aware of it as the familiar force of 1G rose sharply to almost twice its usual stress. Kneeling on the padded floor my neck was the first to feel it - as my head usually a comfortable four or five kilogrammes was beginning to weigh more like nine or ten!
I wrestled to hold the camera up to frame my face trying to talk through my first parabola experience - but the 5kg camera was getting heavier along with my arms and it began to sink. I tried to shift my kneeling position, but found the effort I was used to applying to this rather ordinary movement was not enough. It raised by bottom off my heels for a fraction of a second - before I collapsed again back into the same kneeling position from which I'd started.
I tried again - this time straining to rotate my legs round underneath me. It was of course like another invisible person was sitting on my shoulders, but the great effort it took to accomplish this simple manoeuvre still surprised me.
The count through the climb reached 40 seconds and the French voice declared "injection……" Abruptly the second invisible person climbed off my shoulders, and like some kind of soul leaving my body my own mass also clambered out of me! I immediately began to levitate - rising towards the ceiling like an escaped party balloon - tethered to the floor only by the strap over my right foot. Looking ahead of me the whole room felt like it was beginning to turn head over heels.
There are no windows in this part of the "Zero G" airbus. Seeing what the horizon is doing is supposed to disarm passengers - making them feel distressed and possibly contributing to their nausea.
But even without windows the balance sensors in my ears were well aware that something strange was happening. It was like the sensation you get in a commercial plane when you aren't looking out of the window and the aircraft begins to turn - banking to one side, beginning a climb or a descent. The tiny hairs in your semicircular canals are immediately aware that your body is being tilted.
But this surreptitious tilting felt even more extreme here. Following the balance sensors in my ears alone I could swear that the plane was tipping right up - up on one end and then completely over. But my eyes showed me another thing - that the room was still the right way around and although people were floating most of them still had their heads up towards the ceiling and their feet towards the floor. These standards for gauging the orientation of the world which I'd lived with for 35 years were hard to suddenly ignore. The conflict of sensory messages in my head meant that my brain simply couldn't make sense of the experience - a fascinating feeling in itself.
As I'd risen into the air so had my camera still in my hand - but entirely effortlessly I now held it out in front of me - in a position near my face which I was used to having to work hard to achieve back on Earth. It was really lovely just to hold it there without any exertion. I let go of it completely. It stayed there suspended in a way I could only marvel at with childlike eyes.
Usually
limp, lifeless and restricting my headphone cable was now suspended in a series
of living, drifting, kinks and coils. It drew my attention to the whole
weightless experience - etching its image on my memory.
The parabolas were being flown in groups of five with a break of a few minutes in between. At the start of the second set of five I found myself further from the netting than was safe. Without anything to hold on to there was a tendency to drift uncontrollably up and off down towards the tail of the plane.
I thought I'd got used to the sensation of hypergravity - but trying to crawl back into position quickly with a camera in one hand and the count down drawing close to zero G again I found my wrists suffering greatly. Each time I lifted my right arm and put it down again on the padded floor the great feeling of twice my weight slammed it at twice the normal speed onto the deck. Crawling hadn't been a problem since before my memories began. I felt pathetic as I struggled to reach the safety of the netting.
As the net drew close enough to clutch the problems of weighing too much abruptly became a problem of weighing too little and I lifted off the ground - clinging onto the camera with one hand and reaching for the netting with my other as I shot up like an elevator heading for the penthouse!
I found that it was not just my conventional indicators of direction and my concept of up and down that had to be thrown out the window. There was also the new etiquette of floating rather than standing to learn. On the ground you could mostly be sure that you weren't going to kick someone in the face as you moved around. On Earth faces tend to be above foot height. But up here free floating you could never be sure of where your feet were in relation to someone else's head. Your head height might have become someone else's foot height, or vice versa.
I was bobbing up and down during one loop - sort of treading air - adjusting the locked off camera whilst right in front of me Wubbo was showing how at home he was in zero G - being filmed doing hand stands and summersaults. Next door a young student taking time out from his Brazil nut experiment went into a rather clumsy spin - his left foot hurtling round and crashing into Wubbo's head.
Wubbo finished his acrobatics abruptly; rubbing his forehead and looking a little dazed. The young German looked a little sheepish as he was reprimanded by a flight safety crewman. "Be more careful. You move too fast." He grinned nervously when I pointed out later that there weren't many people who could say that they'd kicked an astronaut in the face in zero gravity!
Our last 20 seconds of weightlessness on the 31st parabola came too soon and I took a break from my duties to enjoy the sensation completely - doing a kind of unbelievable pole dance - swinging out horizontally in a way that any Russian gymnast would have been proud of! All too quickly I found myself bumping up onto the ceiling, - in a strange kind of "out of body" experience suddenly looking down on the floor and everyone else going about their business. I was still lying on the ceiling six feet off the ground when the countdown out of zero G went into single figures. Somehow perhaps like a bird coming in to land I flung and twisted by legs down towards the ground just in time as pilot pulled out of our last dive.
And it was all over - our eleven minutes and 36 second ration of weightlessness was gone and the hyper-G reality of coming out of this last loop was upon us. I dismantled the cameras as everyone went round hugging each other. A peculiar wave of relief that the ordeal was over, tinged with a craving for more washed around the cabin.
I went back to my seat and slumped in it exhausted. A dizzy glow of pride warmed me. I'd wanted to be weightless ever since I'd seen film of astronauts in the 1960s tumbling round the Earth, and now I had joined them in their gravity defying dances.
It was a feeling that floated just out of reach of any words to adequately describe it. Weightlessness had been as wonderful as a first kiss or that uncontainable childhood feeling of expectation on Christmas Eve. It was no wonder Wubbo chased the sensation each year.