Stephen Hawking on the Vomit Comet
Stephen Hawking got to experience zero-gravity a few days ago.
From the
Washington Post:
A Long-Awaited Taste of Outer Space
Stephen Hawking Takes a Buoyant Ride on a Zero-Gravity Flight
It might not seem like a brilliant idea, allowing a frail 65-year-old paralytic to float free from gravity aboard a rising and plunging roller-coaster stunt flight.
But who's to argue with Stephen Hawking?
The celebrated British astrophysicist and black-hole theorist, author of "A Brief History of Time," paralyzed by Lou Gehrig's disease and communicating largely through eye movements, has long wanted to visit outer space. Human survival depends on getting there, he says. An event here Thursday was described as his first improbable step.
Dressed in dark blue flight suits, Hawking and an entourage of caretakers boarded a Boeing 727 that roared out over the ocean and carved huge parabolic arcs in the sky, creating for passengers the "zero-gravity" effect of being in space.
While floating, Hawking, who has been in a wheelchair for nearly four decades, was spun twice -- pirouetting like a "gold-medal gymnast," a crew member said. Someone floated an apple in the air alongside him in an allusion to Isaac Newton, whose esteemed chair Hawking now holds at Cambridge.
As each of the 25-second spells of weightlessness ended -- as the plane headed to the bottom of each arc -- assistants ensured that Hawking was lowered to a mattress on the plane's floor as gravity kicked back in.
"It was amazing. . . . I could have gone on and on. Space, here I come," Hawking said afterward, once again sitting in his wheelchair, his "voice" the product of a computerized synthesizer to which he dictates using eye movements.
Hawking, considered one of the giants among physicists pondering the beginnings of the universe, said he hopes to take a greater leap into the heavens in 2009 on a space plane being developed by Richard Branson's company Virgin Galactic. Flights like the one here Thursday -- once known at NASA as "vomit comets" -- have been used to accustom astronauts to space travel.
And did Stephen enjoy his ride?
"He was grinning the entire time," Diamandis said.
He hasn't
rapped about this yet but his new album is due to be released this summer so there should be something on it.
Posted by DaveH at April 27, 2007 9:40 AM