Go Weightless: Try a Zero Gravity Flight

I've seen TV personalities laughing and floating on zero gravity flights but I never thought of it as an experience for the common woman. Well, I was wrong. If you have been saving your pennies (lots of them) you too can walk on the ceiling, gulp floating water droplets and have the time of your life.

Charles Platt has written a terrific article for Boing Boing about his experience aboard G-Force One, the special aircraft used by the Zero Gravity Corporation. The flights offered by Zero G are the only way one can experience weightlessness without going into space. The company uses parabolic flights to help passengers become lighter than air -- the same method that NASA uses to train astronauts. Anyway, Platt's article is both entertaining and informative and worth a read.

Just in case you're thinking you're too old for weightlessness, one of Platt's fellow riders was a woman who had signed on as a way to celebrate her 90th birthday. And, in case you're wondering why anyone would want to do this, here are a few words from Zero Gravity Corporation Cofounder Peter Diamandis as they appear in Platt's article:

“I’ve experienced it 70 times, and it’s still an amazing amount of fun. It’s a sense of pure joy, a magic show, a feeling of bliss, a return to a childhood state. It creates a true sense of wonder. It’s hard, as an adult, to have a new experience that is so transcendent, because normally everything you do is a slight variation of something else you’ve already done. But here is something completely different and wonderful.”