Australia just flew its own 'vomit comet'. It's a big deal for zero-gravity space research

By Gail Iles, Senior Lecturer in Physics, RMIT University

Last Saturday, a two-seater SIAI-Marchetti S.211 jet took off from Essendon Fields Airport in Melbourne with an expert aerobatic pilot at the controls and a case full of scientific experiments in the passenger seat.

Pilot Steve Gale took the jet on Australia’s first commercial “parabolic flight”, in which the plane flies along the path of a freely falling object, creating a short period of weightlessness for everyone and everything inside.

Parabolic flights are often a test run for the zero-gravity conditions…

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