ON BOARD THE VOMIT COMET
Earth has a problem, at least if you want to train astronauts. It’s called gravity, and while useful for things like attaching your feet to the ground, it’s an inconvenience when you need to acclimatise people to weightlessness. So what do you do? If you’re a national space agency, you set up a special flight that takes advantage of free fall to simulate the weightless experience.
In order to simulate a feeling of weightlessness like astronauts experience once free of Earth’s gravity, the aircraft flies a particular flight path. It climbs at an angle of 45 degrees to altitude before nosing over and descending at 30 degrees in a parabolic path relative to the centre of the Earth, using just enough engine thrust to cancel out the drag of the aircraft moving through the air. During certain parts of the flight, the aircraft and all aboard it are in free fall and experience weightlessness. This begins while the craft is still ascending, continuing while it passes the
