What happens on a vomit comet?
Whichever is true, Yaniec believes that it was anxiety that produced the most airsickness in zero-g aeronauts. However, as we evolved in a 1G environment, space adaptation syndrome (SAS) is a very real problem for those who boldly venture above the atmosphere. The first person to vomit in space was Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov, who orbited Earth for a full day in 1961 aboard Vostok 2. He was about to eat one of his planned meals when nausea set in, and spent much of his flight feeling very ill, even after he managed eight hours’ sleep. After 12 orbits of Earth he began to feel much better. History does not record the state of his capsule when it was retrieved after landing in
Russia’s Saratov Oblast region, but its subsequent reuse as a weight to test an experimental parachute system – a test that saw the spacecraft shattered into tiny pieces – perhaps tells us something.
Space adaptation syndrome can be thought of as motion sickness in reverse. While the two conditions affect a person’s vestibular system – the bits of the inner ear that contribute to our balance and spatial orientation – motion sickness is a reaction to the difference between observed motion and felt motion, while SAS is a complete lack of felt motion, even though the eyes are insisting the body is moving. “Your body just isn’t built to deal with zero gravity,” says astronaut
Steven Smith, veteran of four Space Shuttle flights and seven spacewalks. “There’s no way of predicting how someone will handle it. Someone who gets car sick all the time can be fine in space – or the opposite. I’m fine in cars and on roller coasters, but space is a different matter.”
Speaking of roller coasters, that’s how MITtrained engineer Emily Calandrelli describes her experience on the zero-g flight: “I think it’s totally unique,” she tells us. “The only thing that I can liken it to is if you are on a really big roller coaster where you get some air time. Like if the roller coaster goes over a hump really quickly and you lift off your seat and you get that butterfly feeling in your stomach. It’s like that, just for longer.”
Calandrelli has ridden the Comet three times, twice with NASA and once with the Zero Gravity Corporation. “The first time was as a student,” she says. “I participated in the flight opportunities program that NASA had, so I was part of a class that was working on a science experiment that we were hoping to fly in microgravity, or weightlessness, and we designed an experiment and then submitted it to NASA.”
The experiment was about laminar flows and the circular hydraulic jump. Watch water flow away down the sink and you’ll see a circle of really smooth water bordered by bumpy water. This is a laminar flow, and it has different heat transfer properties than the water around it. It can be used to cool down electronics, and under different gravitational conditions the circle changes size, which is what Calandrelli’s experiment measured.
“We turned on the faucet on the Vomit Comet to see how big that circle would be and just added to the data of what people already knew about
fluid dynamics. We tried to understand how water worked in space and how water would work in a weightless environment,” she says.
And despite being ostensibly ‘work’, it was an enjoyable experience. “I always tell people it’s one of the coolest human experiences I’ve ever felt,” she says. “It quite literally feels like you’re flying, so it’s just so joyful. I think my cheeks were hurting after 45 minutes on the flight because I was just smiling so much the whole time.
“There are a number of things happening at once,” she continues. “You’re experiencing something that your body has never experienced before, and you are just very excited about what’s going on. But you’re also a little bit disoriented, because if the plane is moving up and down and up and down you’re feeling weightless and then heavy and weightless and then heavy. It’s very chaotic and your body is moving all around. You can’t just sit down in your chair and focus on your experiment and pull this lever and press that button. You have to find a way to hold on to something, to make sure your body doesn’t fly away from your experiment, so that you can actually do your experiment.”
And as for the idea that it’s anxiety that makes people nauseous on a zero-g flight, Calandrelli describes it as a mixture of nervousness and excitement: “There are some nerves knowing you’re going to be in a plane that’s going to dive towards the ground. That is not the direction the planes are supposed to be flying, and so I was certainly nervous about that aspect of it, but I think after the first one, once you start doing the parabolas and everybody’s having fun and it’s just very exciting, then those fears just fly away.
“When you get back on the ground you feel great because now you’ve got the ground under your feet, but you’re also exhausted. Like any experience where there’s a lot of anxiety and excitement and nervousness that builds up, your body just runs through all that adrenaline. Once you come back down you’re like, I need a nap.”
Although NASA has run the flights since the early days of space exploration, in 2004 a private company, the Zero Gravity Corporation, began offering the service too, and has taken over the astronaut-training flights since 2008. Founded by a former astronaut, a NASA engineer and an entrepreneur, in 2006 it became the first private company to be granted permission to use the Kennedy Space Center’s Shuttle Landing Facility on Merritt Island, Florida.
In 2007 it began flights for tourists from Las Vegas, at several thousand dollars per passenger for a 90-minute flight. You can even get married in zero gravity, and celebrities such as Buzz Aldrin, Steven Hawking and presenters from TV channels such as Discovery, National Geographic and the
BBC have all risked the company’s Boeing 727-227F Advanced, known colloquially as G-Force One.
Hollywood has also wanted to get in on the action, using the parabolic flights to film sequences in movies such as Apollo 13. The American space program isn’t the only one in the world, and there are similar training flights operated on the other side of the Atlantic. The European Space Agency and French National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) have been running parabolic flights since 1984, currently using an Airbus A310 based at Bordeaux-Mérignac airport in France and operated by Novespace. From Russia you can take commercial flights aboard an Ilyushin Il-76.
The need for astronaut training can only increase as NASA gears up to send crewed missions to the Moon and Mars and space tourism becomes a very real possibility. As flights increase, prices will fall, and a brief burst of weightlessness aboard a parabolic flight might become an achievable dream for all. Just don’t go without a sick bag.