Saturday, March 11, 2000
Students get a taste of space
NASA gives team from UC chance to learn
BY TIM BONFIELD
The Cincinnati Enquirer
HOUSTON — Decked out in olive green flight suits, pockets stuffed with white plastic “barf bags,” Paul Zomkowski and Zoe Ruedele got as close to real spaceflight on Friday as a person can get without actually going into orbit.
The University of Cincin nati aerospace engineering students spent about two hours inside the padded cargo bay of a NASA-owned jetliner as it roller-coastered through a series of parabolic arcs over the Gulf of Mexico.
The jet's unusual flight path gave the students a 12-minute taste of weightlessness in 30 chunks, each lasting about 25 seconds.
They flipped. They soared. They twirled. And one of them hurled. But they savored every second.
“It was really awesome! I was laughing the whole time,” Ms. Ruedele said, even though she got sick on the 28th parabola. “This was something you just can't get anywhere else. I want to do it again.”
The students were part of the Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. For the past four years, college teams have competed for the chance to perform experiments aboard NASA's KC-135 zero gravity training aircraft, better known as the “Vomit Comet.”
This year, students from two area universities — UC and the University of Ken tucky — are among 48 college teams in the program. It's the first trip for a UC team and the third for the University of Kentucky.
Two more UC students, Eric Riedl and Michael Volle, were scheduled to fly today.
The KC-135, which NASA officially calls “the Weightless Wonder,” is based at Ellington Field near Johnson Space Center. This is where all NASA astronauts get required flight time on T-38 training jets and practice landings in planes that mimic space shuttle flight characteristics.
NASA flies the blue-striped modified Boeing 707 almost every day to train would-be astronauts and test equipment destined for orbit. NASA has flown a plane like the KC-135 since 1959 — a few years before the United States actually put a man into space.
The testing is needed be-
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