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Download PDF Cosmologist Stephen Hawking soared into weightlessness Thursday on a zero gravity flight that allowed the leading expert on gravity to escape his wheelchair for a brief period of time.
“It was amazing … I could have gone on and on,” Hawking, 65, said after riding for two hours on a modified jet that flew a rollercoaster trajectory to create the impression of microgravity.
“Space, here I come” he said at Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. The British professor, who has spent most of his career studying black holes and gravity, hopes the flight will be a prelude to a 2009 voyage into space.
“I have long wanted to go into space,” said Hawking, who is almost entirely paralysed. “A zero gravity flight is the first step to space travel,” he said at a news conference near the runway. “I hope many people will follow in my path.”
Four doctors and two nurses were with Hawking on the flight aboard G-Force One, also known as the vomit comet.
Zero Gravity Corporation, a private company, usually charges 3,500 dollars for the flight, but the famed Cambridge professor got a free ride, with another eight seats auctioned off for charity.
Specially trained pilots took the plane up to 10,000 meters (33,000 feet) before plunging to 2,500 meters (8,000 feet) to give the passengers about 30 seconds of gravity-free flying.
The aircraft repeated the manoeuvre eight times, giving Hawking a total of four minutes of diminished gravity.
“Professor Hawking reached for the sky and he touched the heaven today,” said Peter Diamandis who heads the flight company.,
Hawking was seated as the plane went up. Once the aircraft topped over to zero gravity, two people lifted him and guided him up into mid-air, where he floated freely.
“I have been in a wheelchair for almost four decades, the chance to float free in zero gravity will be wonderful,” he said before boarding the flight at the runway usually used for space shuttle landings.
On Wednesday, the plane’s crew and Hawking’s assistants ran a test flight, using a 14-year-old boy to stand in for the British professor.
The flights aboard Zero-G One are similar to those the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) has conducted for 40 years to train astronauts.
Zero G says the weightlessness experienced inside the plane is similar to a free fall in sky diving.
On his 65th birthday in January, Hawking said he wanted to fly into space in 2009 aboard the Virgin Galactic spacecraft being developed by British entrepreneur Richard Branson for commercial suborbital flights.
He says he wants to encourage public interest in space flight, which he believes is critical to the future of humanity.
“I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space,” said Hawking.
“I believe life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers,” he said.
Hawking, who is Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University — a post once held by Sir Isaac Newton — suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.
He was diagnosed with the muscle-wasting motor neuron disease at the age of 22. He is in a wheelchair and speaks with the aid of a computer and voice synthesizer.
His work has centred on theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity, looking at the nature of such subjects as space-time, the “Big Bang” theory and black holes.
British cosmologist Stephen Hawking, 65, experiences zero gravity during a two-hour flight on a modified jet that flew a rollercoaster trajectory over the Atlantic Ocean on Thursday
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