Alisa Hawkins
Georgia Tech AE Undergraduate
Alisa's GT Webpage
My Flight Experience
Being a part of a NASA RGSFO Team has been an awesome experience. I've learned so much from being a part of of this team and am really glad that I was given this opportunity. My favorite parts were the flight (of course) and also getting to know the people that I worked with when getting ready to fly.
I have tons of stories, but probably most significant is the flight itself, which was so much fun! The sensation that you get when you first start to lift off the ground as you enter into microgravity is totally weird and indescribable. You just keep lifting up… and up… and up… and it doesn’t stop until you’re just floating there. When going back and watching our footage, you can hear everyone’s initial reaction and it’s half-way between excitement and pure elation. Of course everyone’s initial reaction is to try to reach for something or put their feet towards the ground, but that doesn’t help too much.I must admit that I was starting to get pretty nervous the morning before we flew. We had to get up bright and early to make sure to make it to Ellington on time, so I had a while to think about the plane ride that I was about to undertake. The real fear/nervousness didnty hit until I actually got on the plane and realized what I was about to do. My nervousness wasn’t too bad, though. I reminded myself that people fly planes in parabolas all the time (right?)… The instant that I started lifting off the ground during the first parabola my anxiety immediately went away. From that point on it was get down to business and make sure to have a little bit of fun too.
During the first couple parabolas, we floated around to try to get use to the having no gravity on our bodies. Courtney ended up bumping her head on the roof of the plane few times. She kept pushing off the floor with a little too much force and that would send her strait up to the roof. I couldn’t keep my self strait up and down and kept rotating all over the place. Even when holding on to something I kept rotating upside down.
We started the experiment when we got use to the zero g, sat down next to our box, and began working. Courtney was first to pop the balloons and she had to get use to it a little first. She modified our popping technique slightly cause it was a bit different popping balloons in microgravity. Courtney eventually got it and was popping balloon with the best of them.
Towards the last couple parabolas of the set, after we had popped about 6 or 7 balloons, slack began to develop in one of the balloon lines. In our experiment, slack is bad. Instead of making it any worse we decided to wait it out (actually float around) during the last couple parabolas of the set and try to fix the experiment during the break time.
Note: Duct tape does not stick to a surface that has just been splattered by a combination of olive oil, milk, and soap. I learned that very quickly while trying to repair our experiment. They say that duct tape solves all man’s problems, but I guess “all” is a little too much to ask. Whoever said that must not of included when you are repairing a microgravity experiment at 25,000 ft in less than 3 minutes. But we eventually got it going again with less slack than before. So, we gave a go to the test directors and off we went into our next set of ten parabolas.
During the second set of parabolas, we popped some more balloons and recorded the data. This time it was me popping the balloons, which was a bit of a challenge. We were still on schedule because we originally planned to pop 6 balloons per set of ten parabolas to give us some leeway time. So, we had lost of time to do our experiment and take in the whole experience of floating in microgravity.
By the time we got back to our experiment to fix it during the second break it had lost tension completely and was one big ball of fishing line and balloons. Instead of fretting and giving up, we just took the handy-dandy Swiss Army pocket knife and cut all the balloons from the spools so we could get to them during the next set of parabolas to continue the experiment. After this event, I have now conformed to believing that a Swiss Army pocket knife will solve all of man’s problems.
Off into the third set of parabolas we went. Of course, as soon as we hit zero-g all the balloons starting floating around the box. Now imagine this: inside our experiment box there are about ten balloons floating around in every random direction (all of them covered with oil, milk, and soap) and you have to stick your hands through these big sandblaster gloves (which are also covered with oil, milk, and soap) and try to catch one of the balloons and successfully pop it, while at the same time make sure that your body does not float up because of the zero-g, you don’t poke your self with the needle, and that you capture everything on video. Talk about some skill. Needless to say, we didn’t manage to get every single pop with in the view of the camera, but we got a couple good ones, and that’s what counts. And, we didn’t poke ourselves either, which Troy (one of the test directors) was really afraid we would do.
All in all our experiment went very well and was a success. Not exactly as planned, but it worked! Yeah!! We popped all the balloons and actually got some of those pops on video. We have data to prove it, which we are currently editing and analyzing for our final report. So, we are happy and hopeful that we will be able to use our data for a productive and meaningful purpose.
I highly encourage anyone and everyone to get involved with the NASA RGSFO Program. I have learned so much and meet so many wonderful people. I was involved in almost every step of the way and learned a great deal about the experimental design process from initial brainstorming and writing of the proposing, to designing and building the hardware, and then actually flying the experiment and analyzing the results. I also developed skills in so many other different areas including working closely with the AE machine shop, creating 3-D modeling drawings, acquiring funding, making travel arrangements, working with media people, developing and updating our webpage, and the list goes on and on.
I am very grateful to the many people that helped our team out along the way in getting us to NASA and allowing us to perform our experiment aboard the KC-135. Some of these people include the NASA Reduced Gravity Office, the Texas Space Grant Consortium, Dr. Jerry Seitzman (or advisor), Ms. Wanda Pierson with the Georgia Space Grant Consortium, and Harry, Wayne, and Mike in the AE machine shop. I have gained so much from being part of this team and it is something that I will never forget.
