Travel Tourism’s final frontier beckons
My body is suspended midair, and it’s all I can do to breathe steadily. Everything around me is whitewashed. The padded ceiling and floor have blurred. I’m not consciously twitching a muscle, yet I’m moving. And I’m laughing – uncontrollably – because my mind cannot accept the absurdity of what my body knows to be true: I’m flying.
I am onboard a Boeing 727 owned by the Zero Gravity Corp. It’s the only commercial plane that has been approved by the Federal Aviation Administration to take passengers on a journey that re-creates the weightlessness of space. Without leaving the atmosphere, the aircraft – known as G-Force One – flies upward, then lunges toward the earth in a parabolic pattern, creating a zerogravity environment in its cabin.
Aboard G-Force One, I’ve lost all sense of up and down, left and right, space and time. Even my spirit feels lighter. I’m seven years old again, improbably living out a recurring dream about gliding over trees and fields and towns. As I float in a sea of feet and elbows, a 300-pound man slowly sails past, curled in the fetal position. The look on his face mirrors mine: absolute bewilderment.
A flight coach is standing over me, poised with a bottle of water. Orbs float out. My fellow passengers’ mouths pucker, vying for bait. One woman attempting to catch water in her mouth misses, and a mercury-like glob slides across her face. When I reach out to touch a mass of water quivering before me, my finger slices through its center. Where there was one orb, there are now two. They drift away from each other, away from me. It’s a gift of physics, but it feels like magic.
I have a tendency to seek out remarkable experiences - eclipses, tornadoes, vast animal migrations. I’ve never been particularly interested in space, but I’ve long been intrigued by travel’s ability to stretch the boundaries of perception. So when I met a former Zero G participant who referred to her flight as “the most awe-inspiring” journey of her uber-adventurous life, I started researching how to book passage.
Parabolic flight was developed in the 1950s as a way to explore the nature of zero gravity, and NASA has long used it for research and training. It’s the only way to achieve true weightlessness without leaving Earth’s atmosphere (aside from drop towers, which aren’t safe for human experiments).
Zero G, based out of Arlington, Va., was founded in 1993, but it wasn’t cleared for commercial flights until 2004. G-Force One maneuvers at degrees so acute that existing regulations would have required passengers to wear parachutes. For years, the FAA seemed perplexed to the point of inaction by the idea of a commercial zero-gravity flight. According to Zero G representatives, FAA officials sometimes wondered aloud: Who in the world would want to do this?
Today, what was once accessible only to scientists and astronauts is an experience open to anyone. Tickets are expensive – $4,950 US – yet more than 15,000 people, ages 9 to 93, have flown on GForce One over the years. The plane regularly airport-hops, to give different regions better access. It’s reminiscent of how, in the 1920s – when airplanes were still oddities – pilots known as “barnstormers” would take their vehicles around the country to give thrill rides. “There’s a misconception that you’ve got to be in great shape or be somehow special to be able to do this,” says Tim Bailey, Zero G’s flight director. “But that’s not true. This is a gateway space tourism experience.”
Indeed, Zero G provides a glimpse into a perhaps-not-toodistant future when space travel will be a more standard part of human existence. Only 560 people have journeyed to space, but the rise of commercial space tourism will, someday soon, radically increase that number. Elon Musk – whom the BBC has called “both bonkers and brilliant” – sincerely aims to build a colony on Mars, and his company, SpaceX, is planning to take two tourists on a trip around the moon in 2018. Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, envisions millions of people going about their daily business in space and has founded a company, Blue Origin, to make it happen. Richard Branson’s commercial spaceflight company, Virgin Galactic, has declared that it has a goal of “democratizing access to space.”
A ride on Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft will cost $250,000. And yet, despite the sticker shock, roughly 700 people, from 50 countries, have signed up – even though the company doesn’t have a hard launch date. Already Virgin Galactic has enlisted more people than have traveled to space in all of human history.
Surely space tourism, once experienced on a mass scale, will affect humanity – and not just because it will open up new vacation opportunities, but because it could reshape us socially, culturally, emotionally. My Zero G experience gave me a window into how this might unfold: how space travel could prove consequential in ways that are difficult to imagine from this point in history. There’s even a chance it might improve life on Earth.
To acclimate fliers, G-Force One starts with gentle parabolas that offer Martian gravity, at one-third body weight on Earth, and lunar gravity, at one-sixth. It’s a slow release from our home planet. When the initial parabola started, I had trouble lifting my head with gravity pulling on my body harder than it ever had before. My heart, my lungs, everything felt like it was being sucked to the floor on an amusement-park ride.
Then my arms were rising, as if pulled by unseen strings. Away went my legs. My torso. My entire body. I was free of something I’d never fully recognized. A coach suggested doing a push-up on Mars. I ended up flipping myself like a pancake.
Within seconds, I was stuck to the mat again. My coach walked by and asked how I was doing, but I couldn’t speak. I gave two thumbs up and braced for our second destination: the moon. There, my body launched at the power of my pinkie and hovered until a call of “feet down” signaled that we should orient our bodies to the mat for landings.
Then, at last: zero gravity. At 1.8 G, every molecule of my body felt like it was tightening; at zero G, every molecule of my body unfurls into a state of relaxation I’ve never reached before. Weightlessness is sometimes defined as an absence of G-force contact stress, the measurement of pressure applied by gravity. And that’s exactly how it feels: stress-less. I’m free-falling through unknown territory.
I quickly lose track of how many parabolas we’ve taken. Each one lasts 20 to 30 seconds, but the concept of time is foreign when you’re levitating. To be weightless is to be suspended in a visceral sense of eternity. There is no end or beginning. There is only the strange relief of shedding a lifetime of expectation. The group doesn’t repress its elation. There are giggles, shrieks and yelps of delight. We’re no longer bound to the Earth. We belong to the expanse.
Decades ago, little was known about how zero-gravity environs would affect the human body. Would people be able to breathe? Could they swallow? “They didn’t know if food would even move down the esophagus,” says Bailey, who is sitting next to me after the final parabola. He pops open a bag of animal crackers.
I’m weak with hunger, but I can’t handle the idea of food yet. I wave off an in-flight snack and draw my arms to my chest. G-Force One is kept cold to stave off queasiness. Its florescent-lit cabin looks a little like the innards of a refrigerator. Bailey figures that, as the number of commercial spaceflights rise, so will a whole service industry. “I’m a flight attendant on my way to being an astronaut,” he says. “Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, they’re all going to need people like me. My colleagues and I are pioneering new career paths.”
I notice that, on his flight suit, he has a picture of Earth, whereas the rest of us are wearing the American flag. He received it from a member of the Space Generation Advisory Council, a nongovernmental organization that advises groups including the United Nations. It was formed by young people who wanted a say in the future of the international space sector. When they designed a flag, they chose the planet as their symbol. “They say that’s the flag we should all be wearing when we go into space,” Bailey says. “We’re not going as a nationality. We’re going as humans.”
Bailey has heard astronauts say that the first day they’re in space, they look for their country. Then, they’ll say, “Oh, we’re over this or that continent.” Then, they just look at Earth. He puts his right hand against the patch, like he might put a hand over his heart during a pledge. “I’m from here. I’m from Earth. That’s the profound cultural change I think space tourism is going to push, thinking about humanity in a larger context.”
There’s a term for what Bailey’s describing: the overview effect. Coined by author Frank White in 1987, the phrase seeks to explain why astronauts who’ve seen Earth from a distance often have lifealtering cognitive shifts. Astronaut Edgar Mitchell has explained that this happens because, when viewing the planet from space, “you develop an instant global consciousness ... an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it.”
The overview effect is a mostly visual phenomenon; and in a zerogravity plane, you don’t, of course, get to see Earth at a distance. Yet there is something about the weightlessness of G-Force One that inspires its own kind of awe. And awe can lead to what David Yaden, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, describes as self-transcendence – the experience of shedding one’s sense of self to feel part of something larger. Yaden, who studies awe, flow, mindfulness and other varieties of experience, suspects that if he attached monitors to G-Force One passengers, they’d find decreased activation in passengers’ brain regions that regulate both spatial awareness and sense of self during flight.
In short, feeling at one with the universe isn’t a hippie notion; it’s also a scientific reality. “It’s important not to be overly enthusiastic about the effect it might have,” Yaden says about awe and space tourism, “but here’s what I hope: As more people travel into space, the increased awe will have a ripple effect, to where people value experiences over material things and increase generosity to those in need. Secondly, the planet is a salient symbol of everything that means anything to us, and space travel could help us recognize that we need to protect it.”
Yaden does suspect that, over time, space travel’s ability to awaken us to awe might fade. Given the way we’ve adapted to car rides – which once required special goggles for a spin around the block and evoked now-unimaginable wonder – it’s likely that the marvel of space travel will lessen as it becomes commonplace. But, in its first decades, space tourism will straddle the threshold of novel yet relatively attainable. Which means we may be alive at just the right moment to revel in it. “It’s possible that we’re in the golden age of awe when it comes to space travel,” Yaden says. “But I believe there’s still more awe to come.”