By Scott Sutherland
Free Press Correspondent
The Burlington Free Press, March 31, 1999 - Page 1C

On March 20, three University of Vermont mechanical engineering majors and a writer flew aboard NASA's KC-135A zero-gravity aircraft.

The students attended NASA's 1999 Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program, which allows teams of undergraduates from colleges around the country to conduct scientific experiments in a weightlessness environment.

The UVM team boarded the KC-135A with an experiment - which they designed and built themselves - that recorded the activity of fruit flies in zero gravity, work they hope will contribute to the scientific community's understanding of the links between metabolism and aging.

HOUSTON

I was moments away from experiencing my first bout of weightlessness aboard the KC-135A, and all I could think of was that my camera was going to kill me.
 

The plane was at 30,000 feet and climbing steeply, and a couple dozen of us - college students, journalists, NASA administrators - were plastered to the padded floor of the aircraft, held there by two g's worth of downward force that made our limbs feel like lead weights. I was on my back to better absorb the g-force, and a small camera, suspended from a cord around my neck, rested on my stomach. The camera weighed a pound or less, but every time I took a breath the camera felt heavy as a brick. The UVM students I flew with Dan Barnett of Asbury, N.J., and Dan Cheung of Roslyn Heights, N.Y. were experiencing their own two-g discomforts, but they were merely last-minute speed bumps on a long, busy road that was about to end in the singular experience of weightlessness.

Dan Cheung (left) and Dan Barnett, seniors in the mechanical engineering program at UVM, experience weightlessness while participating in NASA's Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program.  Strapped to the floor behind Barnett is the tower, the UVM team's experiment studying the effects of weightlessness on fruit flies.

The experiment

The road for Barnett and Cheung and teammate Noel Nutting of Essex Junction began last fall when Tony Keller and Mark Miller, instructors for a mechanical engineering course, asked them to design an experiment that could be carried in the nose cone of a Nike-Orion sounding rocket.

Miller, as part of his doctoral studies, had received a NASA grant in 1997 to study the effects of weightlessness on fruit flies, which would be accomplished by launching the flies - along with a host of complex monitoring equipment - in a sounding rocket that would achieve between five and 10 minutes of weightlessness before falling back to Earth. He needed a strong, well-designed piece of gear to house the experiment, and its design seemed like a perfect project for the undergraduate engineers.

Midway through the fall semester, though, Keller urged the students to apply for NASA's competitive Reduced Gravity program with their yet-to-be-built sounding rocket experiment. The proposal was accepted, and the students hurriedly completed their design work and set about fabricating the device in an on-campus shop. They hired a Williston company, SolutioNet, to design some of the complex electronic components, and worked around the clock to complete the project in the final days before leaving for Houston.

Once in Houston, they continued to tinker with the experiment in between KC-135A safety training classes (which culminated with a session in a hypobaric chamber that produced the dizzying and disorienting effects of being without supplemental oxygen at 25,000 feet), touring the Johnson Space Center and NASA's giant Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, and attending talks by astronauts. The experiment had to pass a Test Readiness Review, conducted by zero-gravity program administrators. Miller spent hours each day tweaking the project's electronics, including a problematic heating-and-cooling system.

Scratched flight

Then there was the matter of who would fly when. The UVM team was scheduled to fly March 19 and 20, two students per flight. UVM only had three fliers, however, which meant one got to go twice. Nutting bowed out, saying one flight would probably be enough. So Barnett and Cheung settled the matter one night over dinner with a rock-scissors-paper face-off - best two out of three. Barnett's paper covered Cheung's rock and his scissors cut Cheung's paper. Barnett would fly twice.

"Awesome," Barnett replied.

But the skies over NASA's Ellington Field at the southeastern edge of Houston on March 19 were dark and menacing.

A large system of powerful thunderstorms was stalled over the region, and after repeated discussions with NASA meteorologists, the KC-135A captain, Ace Beall, scratched the flight.

That meant that, weather permitting, there would be two flights March 20. Zero-gravity program officials were reluctant to say anything about what might happen if the weather was bad again that day - that students from seven schools might have to go home without flying. "Let's just play it by ear," the officials kept saying. "Let's assume we'll get everybody up tomorrow."

March 20 dawned cool and breezy with a high overcast and a forecast for clearing skies: We would fly after all. Barnett and Nutting pulled on olive-colored flight suits, boarded the KC-135A and, accompanied by a couple hundred fruit flies, took off at 9:30 a.m. while the rest of us watched a live video feed of the flight back at Ellington.

After a short flight out over the Gulf of Mexico, Nutting, Barnett and a dozen other students checked their experiments, most of which were bolted to the floor of the KC-135A, and prepared for weightlessness. The aircraft, a converted tanker similar to a commercial Boeing 707, creates zero gravity in the open, padded cabin by flying a series of steep, rolling arcs between 25,000 and 35,000 feet; zero-g conditions exist for about 20 seconds at the top of each arc before the airplane plunges downward and begins another stomach-wrenching two-g climb. Each two-and-a-half-hour flight includes 40 zero-gravity arcs, as well as an arc that simulates lunar gravity and one that simulates Martian gravity.

Then it happened: the figures on the TV screen suddenly popped up off the floor and floated about the cabin as if they were moving through very thin water. Barnett and Nutting, sporting huge grins, bounced off the ceiling and turned somersaults. "Feet down!" a NASA spotter yelled, and everyone got to the floor, fast; the zero-gravity period ends in a hurry, and anyone caught on the plane's ceiling faces a hard fall if they don't get down. A minute later, after a two-g climb, everyone was up and floating again.

We watched the video feed, transfixed. "I can't wait to get up there," Cheung told me. "That looks so cool." I told him I couldn't agree more.

We met the flyers on the tarmac when the plane landed. Barnett looked fresh and ready to go of motion-sickness medication, affects about half the people who fly the KC-135A - hence its nickname "The Vomit Comet.") "It was a little rough on the old tummy," Nutting said, walking gingerly toward the hangar. "But it was still definitely worth it it's the wildest roller coaster ride I've ever been on."

'Uh-oh'

At 1:30 p.m., Barnett, Cheung and I took off on our own weightless adventure. Twenty minutes or so into the flight we were given the OK to leave our seats and prepare for the first series of arcs. I was nauseous even before I got on the plane - for days, people who'd already flown had felt obligated to regale those of us who hadn't with an array of colorful stories involving zero-gravity vomiting - but the fact that we were finally engaged in the flight itself came as an immense relief.

Cheung and Barnett checked the experiment's temperature; it had run too cool during the morning flight, limiting the flies' activity, but some hurried between flight tinkering seemed to have fixed the problem. "One minute!" the spotter called out, preparing us for the climb. I stretched out on my back and began repeating a silent, involuntary mantra: "I will not get sick. I will not get sick."
 

Dan Barnett, a mechanical engineering senior at the University of Vermont, experiences weightlessness aboard the KC-135A. Barnett, along with three other UVM students, designed and built an experiment that studies the effects of zero gravity on fruit flies.

Suddenly, alarmingly, the two-g climb began. My lips felt stretched against my teeth, and I imagined all the blood in my head pooling in the back of my skull. My tiny camera pressed down uncomfortably on my stomach. A new mantra emerged from my bloodless brain: "Oh boy. Uh-oh. Oh boy. Uh-oh." Then the pressure suddenly slackened, like a giant weight had been lifted from me. Then it slackened more. "Here we go!" the spotter shouted, and as he did so I felt my legs leave the floor. I arched my back a little, pushed against the floor with my elbows, and began slowly floating toward the ceiling. Amazingly, improbably, I was weightless. I let out an odd, involuntary giggle just as another floater, trying to figure out how to propel herself about the cabin, accidentally kicked me in the back.

After a couple of arcs most of us seemed to get the hang of moving in weightlessness. As Cheung and Barnett floated around the UVM experiment, explaining it for a NASA videographer, I crawled upside down along the ceiling of the cabin, stopping here and there to do back flips. The sensation was like cavorting underwater, but without the resistance. There were odd moments when I couldn't discern up from down, and only by concentrating on the bolted-down experiments was I able to get my feet to the floor before the zero-gravity period ended.

Iron Dan

The flight passed in a blur. After the final arc we buckled ourselves into the seats in the back of the plane and prepared to land. Cheung and a dozen other flyers battled nausea, but Barnett, even after 84 grueling arcs, still looked fresh. The rough landing took a toll on my worked-over stomach, but we got down just in time - I considered it a kind of miracle that I didn't get sick. Once we were on the ground, I was ready to go up again.

That evening at dinner, the students discussed the flights with Miller and Keller. The data had yet to be collected from the experiment, but Miller was already optimistic. "The experiment and the students both performed really well," he concluded. "I don't see how this could have gone any better."

The students were set to begin their two-day drive back to Burlington, but there was one more piece of business to conduct before they left: figuring out who won the pool for guessing what arc each flyer would get sick on. After a quick tally, the winners were Keller and, appropriately, Barnett, whose double-flight exploits had earned him the title "Iron Dan."

"Awesome!" Barnett exclaimed while his teammates ponied up. "The flights were cool, but this really makes it worthwhile."

Scott Sutherland, a writer in Portland, Maine, accompanied the students to Houston for the University of Vermont alumni magazine.