Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [147]
When Zero Gravity Corporation commenced a nationwide tour in key cities across the United States to fly its “G Force One” plane and promote this new adventure, the National Space Society (NSS) offered a special deal on discounted tickets to its members for the first of two flights to be launched out of Burbank, California. The NSS is a great grassroots organization for space advocates and enthusiasts, of which I was privileged to serve as chairman for several years in the 1990s. The organization has grown and expanded under the excellent guidance of its young and knowledgeable director, George Whitesides. They asked me to join the flight to publicize the event. I hadn’t been weightless in thirty-five years, so I thought it would be a good chance to brush up on my technique. Lois wasn’t quite up for this adventure, so Lisa came along in hopes that there might be an extra seat available. I also invited along former Los Angeles Mayor Dick Riordan, though ultimately he couldn’t stay through the delayed takeoff schedule.
I was asked to offer some words of encouragement to the participants, and share a few thoughts with an ABC newscaster covering the event. As the twenty-five NSS novices went through their brief training session, I could see this was a good first step toward exposing the public at large to the adventure of space travel. Their eyes lit up with excitement and a sense of anticipation as I shared with them a bit of my ShareSpace philosophy:
The phrase “tourism in space” is no longer the giggle that it was about ten years ago. And I can say that not only do I want to be alive to see humans walk on the moon again, but I also want to be alive to see things like lotteries selecting people to go into space. My interest, eventually, is orbital travel, and I know that the interim step is suborbital activities, and I applaud all the efforts that are being done on that behalf. I want to accelerate the movement from suborbital flight to orbital as soon as I can. That’s very difficult to do. And only governments have been able to do that so far, so it’s quite a challenge to get the private sector and the entrepreneurs somehow to do what until now only governments with a lot of money have been able to do. We need to open it up to a vast increase, and that’s why I think the use of sponsors that are involved in supporting this activity can also be instrumental in helping to select the participants who get involved in it.
It was time for the flight. All the participants and I donned our blue flight suits, provided by Zero Gravity, and accented with sponsor Diet Rite space patches on the pockets. Buckled into a few seats in the back of the specially modified and padded Boeing 727 plane during takeoff, we soon unstrapped as the plane rose to a sufficient elevation to begin its parabolas. The pilot would fly about ten of these maneuvers—a far cry from the eighty I once endured in my training—but probably more than enough for newcomers. The participants would experience parabolas that produced a Mars gravity (one-third Earth gravity) environment, then a lunar gravity (one-sixth Earth gravity) environment, and then complete zero-gravity weightlessness. On the mark, the zero-g guides gave us a countdown as we approached each twenty-five-second period of weightlessness, and issued a warning as we were about to come out and hit the g forces.
“Three. Two. One. Get ready for lunar gravity!”
In pure delight, the participants, guides, and I suddenly found ourselves lighter than air. For me it was like riding a bicycle, but this time it was purely for fun rather than training on equipment in bulky space-suits. For the NSS participants, it was a brand-new sensation as they pushed off from the floor, glided and wafted in a freer movement than they had ever felt before. It was less than a minute, but felt like forever, until the warning for pull-out came and we all assumed our stationary positions