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Traveling with Teens Triumphs in Zero-G

Making the Most of Nothingness with NASA

by Scott Chase

Move over, American Coaster Enthusiasts! The dreamiest roller coaster experience on the planet can’t be found at a theme park. Instead, while earthbound it resides in an unremarkable building, Hangar 990, at the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake, Texas. Traveling with Teens in mid-February joined a dozen late teens and very early twenty-somethings along with an ace flight crew for an unparalleled adventure aboard NASA’s zero-gravity demonstrator, a specially-equipped rubber room inside a gleaming blue and white KC-135 airplane.

Within the KC-135’s spacious confines, based on the venerable Boeing 707 design, a group of budding aeronautical engineers from Purdue University got the thrill of a lifetime. They and a few dozen others from colleges and universities offering aeronautical engineering degrees won the chance to test their student zero-G experiments using NASA’s highest-tech resources in a long-standing program dubbed the Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program (RGSFOP).

Roller coaster addicts speak reverently of vertical drop, acceleration, and peak Gs. NASA’s Weightless Wonder V, the fifth in a sequence of zero-G aircraft, enters the downslope at 34,000 feet, dropping from no miles per hour in a vertical sense to more than 500 mph in less than ten seconds. The aircraft delivers up to 30 seconds of heart-pumping, stomach-churning weightlessness, and offers a solid pullout of up to two Gs, dropping its riders from airy nothingness to potentially bone crushing pushdown. And it does it over and over and over.

To test our endurance, the aircraft flew 30 zero-G parabolas, and then pulled us through one lunar and one Martian loop so we could experience briefly - and in a surreal sense - the gravity of the Moon and then Mars. But more on that later . . .

Much like roller coasters everywhere, there are flashing lights, high excitement, and shouts of delight. As we entered each ascent, at a 45-degree angle generating about 1.5 Gs , the flight deck commander, NASA’s John Yaniec, would shout something along the lines of "Heading up!" Tension would mount, especially among those riders who already had made reference to NASA’s discreet yet effective air sickness bags. Seconds before the aircraft would pitch over the top and into a deep, screaming dive, a sequence of flashing fluorescent lights would signal the imminent advent of feathery weightlessness. Then, as we arced over, John would yell, "Here we go!"

The effect was immediate and sensational. From sluggish compression on the floor of the aircraft, bodies suddenly were everywhere. The kids took turns tending to their experiments, with one group floating gently around their instruments and set-ups as another pirouetted through the airspace, dancing, shrieking, kick boxing or just serenely drifting. On the first parabola, a daring young woman named Marcy directly across from me exploded with hysterical laughter, pushing herself from the floor to the ceiling, hair everywhere, and bounced along the roof of the aircraft. Unhappily for her, by the third arc she was down for the count, head deep into a barf bag, strapped into a standard-issue airline coach seat and wrapped in a blanket.

Purdue Student Experiments Focused on Communications Satellites

These days the commercial communications satellite community bemoans the drying up of a once plentiful well of aerospace engineers and scientists entering the industrial arena. More recently, recruiters and human resources pros will tell you, it’s been a scramble just to keep the pipeline filled.

But this threatened dearth of future space age worker bees was not in evidence during a recent ten-day stretch at the Johnson Space Center near Houston, Texas. Joining the Purdue University contingent was a new generation of potential satellite and space professionals from a dozen colleges - including Alfred, California Polytechnic, North Carolina State, Penn State, and others. The student teams were selected after a rigorous series of tests and evaluations of experiments that, in many cases, were months if not years in the making. Proposals ranged from gauging the effects of weightlessness on human organs to using virtual reality set-ups as zero-G training tools.

One team experiment focused on weight reduction in propellant management vanes. These vanes, situated in the hydrazine fuel tanks typically used to position and move geostationary communications satellites and other spacecraft, keep the liquid propellant in a relatively stable state and help wick the fuel toward the tank outlet valves. Students proposed, built and then tested modified vanes that had various shapes, including models that were drilled out in ways designed to reduce overall weight.

Another Purdue student test also targeted satellite fuel tanks, with a second team seeking ways to improve mass center control. The goal of this experiment complemented the first team’s efforts by attempting "to identify new technologies that will enable exact positioning of the fuel mass center by better controlling the ullage bubble." The ullage bubble, for those not in the know, is, according to Webster’s, "the amount that a container lacks being full." Permutations in the weight of a satellite, the students postulated, can cause difficulties with wobbling in orbit and other station-keeping management concerns.

A third Purdue team tackled the "experimental development of hydrazine fuel line gas arrestors." In this experiment, students devised four mechanical gas-trap schemes to trap gas bubbles that sometimes form in the fuel lines of hydrazine arc-jet thrusters. These bubbles can increase electrode erosion and may disrupt the anticipated force of a thruster burst, thus complicating in-orbit maneuvers and station-keeping.

In fact, according to team member Melanie Silosky, "The data gained from the proposed research could have a tremendous impact on future satellite design. Better dynamic modeling of satellites has positive impacts on guidance and controls, reaction wheel sizing, satellite failure rates, and fuel consumption." With a typical direct broadcast satellite carrying somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 gallons of fuel - and a burn rate of about a gallon a month - any fuel management scheme that can either prolong the life of the spacecraft or improve its operational efficiency is money in the bank. Tagged to income, such a satellite can generate up to $20 million in revenues per gallon of hydrazine, the students estimate.

Along with support from Purdue, and from university Professor Steven H. Collicott, students participating in the 2001 RGSFOP also teamed with researchers and scientists from Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space Co. Other major players in the satellite manufacturing and space utilization arena likewise were paired with additional student groups.

Up Over the Gulf of Mexico

Rollout and takeoff were uneventful and, above the clouds, the sun shone brilliantly. Reaching cruise altitude, Yaniec gave the word that student teams could unbuckle their seat belts and make their final preparations for weightlessness. Then, suddenly, the next few moments were pandemonium as students felt the floor fall away and they started drifting for the first time in a flying zero-G rubber room the size of a four-car garage.

Never has 30 seconds passed so quickly. As abruptly as weightless had uplifted us and set us free, the crushing force of double gravity - 2 gs - pressed everyone to the floor as Weightless Wonder V came out of the dive and headed back up on the ascent. Bones have been broken and noses bloodied by students not prepared for the quick transition from free floating to floor hugging. Within just a few minutes, the sequence was repeated.

It took just two or three parabolas for most of the students to settle down to the their experiments, gauges, and camcorders. And that’s all it took for a few unfortunates to find out definitively that weightlessness doesn’t agree with everybody. Out came the barf bags, and the most severe cases were seated, buckled down and covered with blankets to weather the next 25 or 30 loops as best they could.

Meanwhile, student teams put their experiments through their paces, the entire proceedings documented for all time by two NASA videographers and an agency still photographer. For this flight-team journalist, the adventure was over far too soon. As a final finesse, the NASA pilots treated all passengers to two special parabolas. One simulated the gravity of the moon (about one-sixth of Earth’s) and another that of Mars (about one-half). People danced and leapt, with the more imaginative dreaming of the potential for a visit to long-abandoned lunar outposts. Others tried martial arts moves, apparently a favorite activity for the weightless set.

We were back on the ground just two-and-a-half hours after liftoff.

What the Future Holds

Purdue University is the self-proclaimed "cradle of astronauts," with good reason. Nearly two dozen graduates have participated in missions from the Mercury program (Virgil "Gus" Grissom) to the moon shots (the first on the moon, Neil Armstrong, and the last, Eugene Cernan), to the shuttle program. Today Purdue’s School of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering gets far more applicants to its RGSFOP class than it can handle. For the lucky few that make the cut, the payoffs go far beyond a letter grade.

"Our experiment on weight reduction performed according to our expectations, but it will take some time to fully understand and analyze the data that we captured," says team member Adam Butt. "We need to review the videotapes to see precisely which of our designs offers the best chance at significant fuel cell performance improvement and mass reduction for satellites."

Adds team member Paul Brower, "Every pound of material launched into orbit costs the satellite owner at least ten thousand dollars, and every month of extended lifetime is worth thousands in added revenues. The Purdue tests could end up being worth millions to satellite operators."

The final outcome of student experiments created for and demonstrated during the Spring 2001 RGSFOP won’t be known for months, perhaps years. But one thing is certain: The months of study, of building and testing on-ground prototypes, of managing and then passing the arduous NASA experiment selection process and pre-flight training regimen pays off each year for dozens of lucky college attendees and a handful of honor high schoolers.

"Zero-G was awesome. There’s nothing like it anywhere else," says Butt. "You simply can’t get experience like this in the classroom."

And that’s the point of NASA’s Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program at Johnson Space Center. Inspire a student today, and tomorrow the satellite and space industry worldwide will continue to grow, innovate, prosper and succeed.

For Pictures Click Here:
Purdue University students Paul Brower (left) and Adam Butt, with flight-team journalist Scott Chase (right), hover weightlessly over their experiment on hydrazine fuel tank vanes. NASA photoThe students, pilots and NASA staffers at the end of another RGSFOP flight. NASA photo.

a different shot for your review

same shot

same shot but different alignment of people, with Paul left, me center, Adam right

The author takes a few seconds to enjoy the zero-G experience. NASA photo.

Students, pilots and team journalists pose at the conclusion of another successful flight on the Weightless Wonder V. Photo by Steven J. Collicott.

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Traveling with Teens/Family Travel Worldwide is based in Montgomery County, Maryland. We specialize in family travel adventures, and rate airlines, agencies, tour operators, hotels, bed-‘n’-breakfasts, restaurants, parks, museums, sites, attractions, and other travel items/accessories for kid-, young adult- and family-friendliness, value and fun. 1-301-529-9809; teentravel@hotmail.com.