Up, Up and Away! And down and up, and down and up...

Today was the day I went up in the plane, and yes, I did get sick - let's just get this out of the way in the beginning.

Early in the morning we got up and got ready go, eating a light toast breakfast and got on our way to Ellington field. Not to blame my sickness on something other than the flight, but already that morning I was not feeling well from dinner the night before. We had made vegetarian chili with soy in it, and it was a bit too spicy for me. I ate it, but regretted it the next morning when I got up. I was, however, feeling much better by the time we went to the pre-flight briefing. We got information about how the flight would go - take-off, 10 minutes to set up, 32 parabolas, then some time to break down and then back to our seats for landing. Easy, right?

We took our meds - a NASA developed combo of Scopolamine and Dextramine - and then got lined up to go on the plane!

Here is a picture of Hannah and I ready to go:

When we got on the plane, take-off and set-up went as planned, expect we forgot to turn on our power strip until the second parabola! I noticed that the microwave had no light, so I asked Hannah to look at the power.

Each time we went into microgravity, it was really strange. Because I was strapped down at the waist, I didn't float all over the cabin, so I didn't get the full weightless experiance. I had to still be able to function and "do science" during those times, so I was switching out watchglasses during the microgravity and not be flying around in the cabin. Hannah flew around a bit and hopefully we got some great pictures!

About parabola #12, I couldn't take it anymore. The transition from the hypergravity (2G), where you feel twice your normal weight, to zerogravity was very rough. I went from flat on the ground to sitting straight up in less than a second. While this would not be a problem on the ground, it really gave me a headache. My head was in a lot of pain. Also, it kind of feels like your whole insides are coming up and trying to get out of you. Regardless, I couldn't continue after a while, so the leveled off and got me back to a seat where I could strap in and not float up as much. The transitions were still rough and I was just watching that parabola count up to #32, when I knew that we would level off and land.

Hannah stepped up when I got sick and threw on the thermal gloves and took over the whole experiment. She had a few crew members step in to give some help when she needed to be held down during microgravity. She was able to get 4 runs in and bring our total to 6 runs, though one of our first two hit a part of the flight where we leveled off and only saw 1G, so it won't be super helpful.

On the bright side, there were very minimal fumes and no sparking!

I, in the back, went from being very hot to very chilled. Basically whenever we hit microgravity, I let my knees float up as much as they wanted to, and virtually curled into the fetal position in the air and tried not to move at all in any direction. The transition were still tough, but less so because I didn't have to move my head as far. The doctor and all the flight crew were very helpful and soothing through the whole ordeal.

Still, we all smiled when we got off the plane, so any footage you might see will hopefully have me smiling!

After our experiment was off-loaded, we were able to pull everything apart and get it ready to be shipped off. We ran to FedEx (where customer service was not great) and then found a small souvenir shop to try to find Reduced Gravity patches. We found the store, but not the patches, so we will look around tomorrow when we tour JSC.

All in all, a fun day that I will never forget!! Watch this blog for pictures from our tours tomorrow and then watch for our outreach video of the whole process.