The University’s Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, Stephen Hawking, will soon be studying gravity first-hand in a weightless space flight. Zero-Gravity Corporation has offered Hawking a free ticket for a trip into space. The company is the first to offer weightlessness as a tourist experience, and usually charges $3,750 for the privilege.

Hawking will take off on April 26 from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida in a modified Boeing 727. The plane will climb to 32,000ft before plummeting 8,000ft, allowing the passengers to experience weightlessness for 25 seconds. The flights usually consist of fifteen such ‘parabolas’, and simulations of martian and lunar gravity can be used to adjust fearful passengers to the state of floating.

Hawking will be going ahead with the flight in spite of the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis which has left him almost completely paralysed. He will travel in his wheelchair, accompanied by medical staff. But comment in the national press has questioned whether the professor will enjoy his trip.

Writing in The Guardian, Emma Jane Kirby recalled her experience on a similar flight taken with Russian cosmonauts. “I still remember all too clearly the sensations of my internal organs floating inside my body”, she wrote, “and seeing my stomach contents floating outside it”. Kirby, who is now the BBC’s Paris correspondent, described the flights in terms of a “vomit comet”, and suggested that “98% of people on my flight threw their guts up”. But a first hand account from a passenger on one of the flights run by Zero-Gravity went to lengths to point out that “nobody puked”, suggesting that the newspaper correspondent may have just suffered from a weak constitution.

Hawking’s plans to experience the great beyond are not limited to weightlessness. He has already publicly expressed his wish to go into space on one of the flights that will soon be offered by Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. It has been reported that Branson has decided to personally finance the $200,000 cost of Hawking’s trip when Virgin’s spaceship takes to the sky in around two years’ time.

Elliot Ross

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