Thrills - And Spills - Aboard The `Vomit Comet' -- Reporter Bets Her Lunch On Chance To Float Weightless In Nasa Plane

STUDENT SCIENTISTS from the UW and Seattle Times science reporter Diedtra Henderson, shown here donning oxygen gear, get a chance to work and play weightless.

ABOARD A KC-135 JET - Remember that scene from the movie "Apollo 13"?

Right before the ominous "Houston, we have a problem" line, astronaut Fred Haise Jr. transforms from adult to kid in zero gravity, flipping head over heels and swallowing airborne drops of juice as big as apricots.

This month a bunch of us, space virgins all, traipsed in the very same NASA plane that was used to make the movie, floating high over the Gulf of Mexico with the very same weightless grace as Tom Hanks. Well, almost.

Reporters each year are invited to accompany spunky college students whose experiments test how weightlessness affects people, machine parts and phenomena. Two University of Washington seniors, Lisa Couret and Trevor Olson, were aboard to monitor the light given off by bursting bubbles.

NASA has a stake in the sky-high romps; it foots the bill for a few of the research projects. The NASA Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities program also helps the space agency infect top college and high-school students with the space bug. These kids could be the next generation of astronauts.

But who would pass up the chance to be weightless? In fact, people are willing to pay a Seattle adventure tour company $98,000 for two minutes of zero gravity in suborbital spaceflights promised to begin by 2001.

In the name of science, I eagerly reserved a spot on NASA's plane.

And I hoped my adventure aboard the "Vomit Comet" wouldn't cost me my lunch.

Like that first dreamy kiss

Free-floating for the first time is like sipping that first glass of champagne, hammering your first grand slam or getting that first dreamy kiss: You can never forget.

You can never repeat the initial thrill.

And you want to go back and do it some more.

I had a mid-March date with weightlessness, along with other willing journalists and daring students. But first, months before, came the tests to see if I was fit to float.

"Life's not a science experiment," a friend kvetched recently. Clearly, she hadn't experienced that morning of preflight tests.

I lay on an examination table in Ballard in January for a required electrocardiogram. Little stickies festooned with metal clips were pasted onto my body. I felt like a car battery.

An FAA-certified doctor whose main patients are pilots checked my vision and my hearing. I breathed deeply for chest X-rays.

Zero gravity is not for the faint of heart, shallow of breath or fatally excitable.

During more preflight tests in Houston two months later, a hopeful flier in our group was temporarily grounded when his blood pressure soared. Another fibbed and stifled sniffles, saying he hadn't had recent respiratory problems.

But the pressure-chamber test forced all the little white liars to come clean.

In this test, silver-haired gents who spoke with military crispness doled out World War II-style oxygen masks. They sat us in a chamber that simulates the rarefied air pressure at 25,000 feet.

On command, we turned off our oxygen supplies.

In the thinning air, under their watchful eyes, we struggled to breathe, stay lucid, jot answers to math problems and connect the dots to form a sailboat.

Within minutes, some of the oxygen-starved were willing to pay for even a breath of second-hand smoke.

Others lasted longer, but were unwilling or unable to put on their masks and flip on the oxygen supply. For them, hypoxia was good - very, very good. They giggle. They grin. They act lightheaded.

I have zero memory of some of my own oxygen-deprived moments. A videotape later showed me among the stupefied, sapped of so much brain power within five minutes that I could neither hear nor obey directions. Had I been climbing into Mount Everest's thin air, they'd be chipping my body from a crevasse.

Still, we survived the tests. We had earned our flying wings.

Takeoff

I tried not to feel rattled as I boarded the plane. Be calm, I told myself. Cool.

Strapped in at takeoff, we yammered, our voices electric with expectation. We had converged - finally - on Houston to run or to watch the students' experiments. But another thought dominated our minds - to float aboard the so-called "Vomit Comet" without tossing our cookies.

Soon after takeoff came the early warning from the cockpit: Two Gs was coming. To float like butterflies, we first had to drop like dead weights. We unfastened our seatbelts and scrambled into the padded belly of the four-engine turbojet.

The KC-135, an aerial bucking bronco, starts maneuvers by bolting upright at a furious speed. The quick uphill climb essentially doubles Earth's gravity.

At two Gs, your body feels twice as heavy. If you're on your stomach, it feels like a body double is on your back. If you sit upright, you feel like you're balancing an 8-pound brick on your head. Raising your foot takes energy and concentration: You're lifting it - and an invisible sandbag attached to your ankle.

As the powerful plane noses over the top of its camel-hump parabola path, it begins a free fall that, for 20 seconds or so, erases any sense of gravity. Over the Gulf of Mexico, the plane traces a square shape in the sky, flying 10 roller-coaster rides per side.

After those 40 parabolas, the pilot finishes off with one free fall at the same gravity as the Moon's and another at Martian gravity.

On my first free fall, sparkling bubbles tingled in my stomach, arms and hands as my 150-pound, 6-foot body effortlessly lifted off the ground. I floated up by a foot, three feet, then to the height of the chamber, about nine feet. My buoyancy stalled only when my shoulders grazed the cushioned ceiling.

Feeling panicky, like you're drowning, is natural.

Your body wants to flail, our NASA handlers warned us, dusting off a schoolteacher's tried and true rule: Keep your hands and feet to yourselves. And we were not supposed to use the in-flight bathroom - a pail lined with a plastic bag - because that stuff floats, too.

Another warning: no funny stuff at first, like somersaults or Greg Louganis-style flips. Just because we're weightless doesn't mean we're worry-free.

Roger that.

"Weightless Wonder" is the plane's formal name. But the hulking vehicle soon earned every letter of its nickname, the "Vomit Comet."

"There's no sin" in getting sick, NASA physician Charles La Pinta had confided before we took off.

"Vomit Comet" veteran John Yaniec noted he's flown 11,000 puke-free parabolas before showing us the proper sick-bag technique. As zero-gravity-test director, Yaniec has his finger on the pulse of each flight.

"You just hit the bag. Tie it off," Yaniec said in the preflight briefing. "I've used 'em," he added.

A strapping young man wondered if it was an eerie foreshadow that a toddler had become sick at a nearby breakfast table. (It was.) Just in case, the student downed Fruit Loops so he'd upchuck in cool colors.

By the end of the nearly seven-mile-high ride, all but three of us space virgins had added to the plane's storied reputation, heaping sick bags, soiled face wipes and deflated egos onto a growing pile of shame.

Motion sickness explained

I had taken the levitation lightly, trying not to push my body too hard. The first couple of times, I simply floated up, trying to keep my arms and legs away from experiments and video cameras.

Then about halfway through, a student tried to coax me to be more adventurous. But I could already feel that my gravity-free gig was up.

Lifting my motion-sickness bag was one small step for my stomach and one giant leap toward a near-record "kill" rate for the flight.

My teenage son had predicted it. "You are SO not gonna make it. You're going down," he had giggled.

NASA photographers and videographers, assigned to each flight, also try to predict who will go. One photographer says the sweaty ones almost always get sick first. Some smokers do; others don't.

Ace, the aptly named pilot, for example, leisurely puffed a Marlboro Light before boarding the plane.

The kid who looked out a window and saw the horizon's strange angle? An early goner.

The body just doesn't know how to navigate this new territory. Inside the inner ear, tiny spheres roll like a golf balls in the rough, mashing down grass in the direction of travel.

On Earth, those calcium-carbonate balls in the ear roll microscopic hairs in predictable ways, confirming familiar body position and motion.

In space, those little fellas bounce like pinballs, confounding the body's communications system.

Halfway through our flight, there was a crowd in the back of the plane, strapped in and riding out waves of nausea. But why did we puke? Can't the body come up with a better all-circuits-busy signal?

"We don't know for sure, but it may be that the body `thinks' that the mismatch was caused by the ingestion of toxins and so we vomit as a protective mechanism," reasons Robert Stern, a Penn State University physiology professor.

I watched a few students conduct experiments up front. In back, the sleeves of an empty coat danced with each zero-G fall. About the same time, sick travelers went into overdrive.

La Pinta, the NASA doctor, ministered to our misery, dispensing hard candy to ease dry throats and mask bad taste. He also picked up full bags, handed out replacements and waved a little fan in front of our faces. He's paid nothing for the flights, but the comforting squeeze he gave my shoulder was worth a million.

Back on the ground we squinted into the sun, our lips chapped. Stains spattered even the suits of those who didn't get sick. We posed for a post-flight photo.

My recovery continued with deep sleep that afternoon (and the next day). I had a tender stomach and exhausted arms and hands from easing into each two-G drop.

Couret, a national cycling-team hopeful and UW physics student, was among the three who didn't get ill. Her stomach kept hold of the 6-ounce, $7.95 sirloin steak, salad and rolls she had eaten.

Sure, lunar gravity felt like how, as a child, she imagined floating in the clouds would. Still, she can't imagine doing this astronaut thing full time, spending months in space.

"I like the smell of flowers. I like the smell of grass," Couret said. "I like the feel of rain on my face."

Me? I'd like more of the pleasure and less of the pain.

Diedtra Henderson's phone number is 206-464-8259. Her e-mail address is: dhenderson@seattletimes.com