Actually “free falling inside a speed matched tube” is EXACTLY what Chris Hadfield was doing.
Orbit = free fall without the hard landing.
The only difference between the ISS and what that plane is doing is that plane isn’t going to miss the ground.
I’ve heard the engineers call that plane the Vomit Comet.
I heard that too! That everyone who goes up in that loses their lunch, every one, no matter how many times you’ve gone up.
W!O!N!D!E!R!F!U!L!
!!!
Now I want to go on the Vomit Comet.
!!!
A lot of people lose their lunch but I think “every one” is an exaggeration. They even brought Steven Hawking up on the thing, and he apparently didn’t puke.
My favorite “Vomit Comet” story was how they shot much of Apollo 13 in a set built inside one of those planes. By the end of filming Tom Hanks had logged more hours on board than most living astronauts. Also a cameraman apparently blew chunks all over Kevin Bacon.
TBF… does Hawking eat?
I think he has recently learned to subsist purely on quantum energy.
Awarded with admiration.
Point taken.
At one point, they’re still floating but the previously-floating plastic balls are on the floor. Is that inertia from when gravity came back and then they stay there in freefall again?
Great video. This had to be hard to choreograph what with it being a one-shot like most of their videos and only having like ten or fifteen seconds of zero g at a time.
Also perfect use of a subtle fisheye lens. All around well conceived, well executed, and well shot.
I’ve done zero-G test flights.
It’s fun! Nobody vomited on the ones I was on.
Inertia, yes. Also although they hid the cuts very well, remember the video had to be shot in ~30 second chunks with periods of normal gravity where everything falls to the floor in between.
according to this article about how they made it, over 20 flights people barfed about 58 times:
EDIT: DOH, @Groundman beat me to it : )
Apparently the band members themselves were able to keep it down with help of anti-nausea drugs. That’s professionalism!
Of course it would have been even more impressive if they’d timed their puking to coincide with the paint-balloon-popping part.
OKGO’s videos always just look like, “Man, I wish I could be there filming that with them!”
NASA always insisted we call it the Weightless Wonder, yet another example of NASA being utterly terrible at PR.
