To book your flight and find out more information about ZERO-G, go to the company’s website at: http://www.gozerog.com/. ZERO-G says about the experience: “The once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fly like Superman can now be yours. Train with an expert coach, board our specially modified aircraft, G-FORCE ONE, and experience the unforgettable.”

NASA has been flying similar flights for five decades with astronauts training for space missions and researchers and volunteers for motion sickness tests and other such experiments. However, this is the first time that the public can take the same ride in order to experience weightlessness.

According to ZERO-G only specific dates are available for the flights in Las Vegas. Company officials state that these dates in 2007 are available: May 26, June 16, 176, and 30, August 4, September 1 and 2, October 6, November 10, and December 30 and 31. Flights also occur in New York City, Long Beach, California, and Kennedy Space Center, Florida. One ticket for weightlessness costs $3,500 plus $175 for tax. The 90-minute trip involves 15 parabolas that create the weightless condition.

The airplane creates weightlessness by flying a parabolic near-vertical flight path upward, leveling off, reducing thrust, and dropping down similar to an object (such as a sky diver) in free fall. Consequently, the people onboard the airplane apparent to have zero apparent weight relative to the aircraft.

Additional information on NASA’s Vomit Comet flights (I mean, Weightless Wonder flights) and ZERO-G’s flights can be found at the ITwire article “Dr. Hawking hopes for Weightless Wonder ride”. Within the article, I talk about my experiences with NASA’s motion sickness tests aboard NASA’s KC-135 in the mid-1980s.

Professor Stephen Hawking, who is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (much earlier the position had been held by Sir Isaac Newton) at the University of Cambridge, just took one of the flights from the Kennedy Space Center. One of his comments was: "It was amazing. ... I could have gone on and on. Space, here I come." [The China Post]

Besides the flight, customers will take home their flight suit, photographs and a DVD of the flight, and, of course, the memories.

These flights are only the beginning. This company and others are planning, in the near future, flights in orbit about the Earth, flights to the International Space Station, and maybe even flights around or to the Moon. Let your imaginations fly. So, let’s begin the countdown: 3, 2, 1, …. BLAST-OFF to ZERO-G.

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