| From: US1RMC::"[email protected]" 17-AUG-1994 19:20:26.76
To: [email protected]
CC:
Subj: Questions about my KC-135 article
Claudio wrote:
> Shelley wrote:
>
> =[Note: the parabolic flights the KC runs involve a climb with
> =~50-60 degree deck angle, then a pushover to about the same angle
> =down. In each parabola, there is about 22-24 seconds of nearly
> =zero-G (micro-gravity, to be precise), then 55-65 seconds of pullout
> =with a peak G-force of nearly 3 G's. Each day, the KC does 40
> =parabolas; this takes around 2 hours.]
>
> Actually the maximum angle is 45 degrees. 50 to 60 degrees is the
> angle that NASA Lewis' Learjet, NASA 616, makes with the horizontal.
This was from memory...the actual figures, along with a depiction of
the trajectory, are stencilled in as "nose art" on the plane!
> Last April when I flew the KC-135 the max G we got was 1.8. It pays
> off to make things easier in the aircraft; it lasts longer... Similarly,
> if you go for the Lear you can get a higher acceleration: 2.5 G's.
The max G depends on where in the plane you are. In the back, it was
1.8 G's; in the front (where my friends and I were), it was 2.8 G's.
> The number of parabolas depend, among other things, on the weather
> conditions and how sick the passengers are. As far as I understand
> the record number of parabolas for the KC-135 in a single mission
> is around 105. My record number of parabolas is 68 in March 1993.
> In general the KC-135 flies at least 40 parabolas.
Hmmm...we were told that we would get **40** parabolas; no more, no
fewer. Maybe that was due to it being a PSI-contracted flight (as
opposed to a purely-NASA flight)?
> Can anybody tell me how much does it cost to fly the KC-135? I suspect
> that the total price tag is somewhere around US$ 5 to 10 K per hour. Of
> course, the final price tag per experiment may get lower if you have
> more than one experiment flying...
I can't answer that, but our price (of $4000 for three days' worth of
flying) was per experiment (with one experimenter). I'd say that there
were probably around 10 experiments, with probably 15 or so experimenters.
If the cost is 15 * 4000 / 3 (days) / 2 (hours/flight), that comes out to
$10K/hour, which is close to Claudio's guesstimate.
BTW, one of the things I left out of the posting was the experiment that
Byron Lichtenberg (president of PSI/shuttle payload specialist) and Gay
King (his then fiance/now his wife) were running. It involved putting
heavy equipment into and taking it out of racks. I remember that at one
point Gay was having problems getting the equipment out, and the folks
from PSI were getting concerned, since it was nearly the end of the
parabola with the equipment sticking out of the rack precariously. I
remember folks urgently saying, "Get it down, get it DOWN!" as they
struggled with the recalcitrant equipment. They managed to get it out
and within around a foot of the floor when gravity returned. BANG! It
hit with a crash. Everyone asked Gay if she were all right; fortunately,
she hadn't hurt herself.
--Shelley Rosenbaum
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% Subject: Questions about my KC-135 article
From: US1RMC::"[email protected]" 17-AUG-1994 22:18:55.12
To: [email protected]
CC:
Subj: My Vomit Comet experience, part II
The next day was the first flight (I was scheduled on the second day).
Unfortunately for my friends who went that day, the plane had to come
back soon after taking off, due to a failed autopilot. (Apparently,
the pilots can't do the parabolas without the assistance of the AP.
There are three AP's on the KC, and if any one fails, it is grounds
for an abort.) It took around 4 hours to fix the problem. However,
the half-life of Scopalamine is 3 hours, so my friends went up with
very little of the drug left in their systems. Final score: one got
sick (REAL sick), one had no effects. We asked our friends how zero-G
felt, and they said that it had no comparison to anything they had
ever experienced before.
Now to day two. The experiment I was running was one Rich Kolker had
devised--a human-factors experiment into whether the angle of a
keyboard has any effect on efficiency in microgravity. Rich had done
the experiment the first day (before he got sick!), and said that he
had had problems because although his feet were under a cargo strap,
his body had merely rotated around the strap while in zero-G until he
was lying face down on the floor. So we decided the put my feet under
two separate straps--with one foot around 10" ahead of the other.
The experimenters can tell when a parabola is about to start, because
the flight crew turns on the camera lights in the cabin around 10-15
seconds before entering the microgravity regime. (They don't leave
the lights on all the time, since they generate lots of heat. As it
was, it was plenty hot in the cabin, perhaps ~82F. I was told that
the folks toward the rear of the plane had to suffer with even more
heat than us in the front; it made me feel "lucky.")
I didn't remember a whole lot of pressure changes during the climb up,
but after I watched the videotape I made, I could see that I was
constantly yawning to equalize pressure. But there was a *large* change
in pressure as the cabin lights went on--I can still remember the
feeling on my skin as the pressure decreased. During the first parabola,
I didn't run the experiment. My cap, which was not tied down, started
to float, as did the chocolate-chip cookies I had put on the floor. I
picked up the cookies, and watched as they just floated in front of my
face. It looked as if I were underwater, but then I took a breath and
realized that I wasn't! Strange feeling; my brain was working overtime
trying to process the new sensations.
As I watched the cookies, a few crumbs broke away, seemingly in slow
motion. I quickly moved my head over and gobbled up the crumbs, then
grabbed the cookies as gravity returned. The next parabola I also
floated the cookies, then Tom (my "partner" for the day) put his hand
out. So Tom and I "tossed our cookies." Literally! Unfortunately,
Tom missed, and the cookie floated back towards the back of the plane...
who knows where it wound up!
For the remainder of the set of parabolas (the KC does four sets of
10 parabolas, with a 5-minute break in between each set), I just tried
to "experience" what zero-G felt like. My friends were right, it just
can't be described. It reminds me of the scene in _Star Trek IV_,
where McCoy asks Spock to describe his experiences with "life...death...
life...":
Spock: I cannot tell you, since we have no basis of understanding.
McCoy: You mean I have to die and be reborn in order for me to
understand what it was like?
It's something like that--there are similar experiences, but nothing
quite the same.
Toward the end of the first set, I knew I wasn't feeling 100%, but I
didn't know whether I'd be sick. I just felt different (again, unlike
any feeling I had ever had before). During the next set of 10, I
alternated between doing some "aerobatics," and lying on the floor
(where cool air was coming in through a slight leak in the cargo door
I was near--it was HOT in that plane with all the camera lights on!).
Even when I was lying on the floor, I was still taking in the "feeling."
I found that I could decide at any point which way was up and which way
was down, and it didn't matter if that didn't agree with everyone else's
up and down! A *very* strange sensation.
BTW, apparently this is not typical--the NASA folks said that many
astronauts have had problems with a notion of up and down, and could
get space-sick almost instantly if someone had floated past upside-down
wrt their reference frame. Fortunately, in nearly all cases, there's
no "space sickness"--it's more like "space adaptation syndrome," since
most people will eventually adapt.
In the third set of 10, I started doing the experiment. Guess what--
having my feet staggered didn't help. On the videotape, you can
watch as I start typing with my back on the floor (and my feet under
the straps), and I gradually float to an upright position. If I
hadn't braced myself at that point against the roof of the plane,
I would have also rotated completely around until I would have been
face down on the floor.
After around 28 parabolas, I knew that my time had come. I reached
into the breast pocket of my jumpsuit for the U.S. Government-issue
barf bag that I had placed there...but it had floated out! I then
went into another pocket, got another bag out of its envelope (sort
of like the envelopes that Sic-Sac's come in), and proceeded to get
sick. In the middle of vomiting, we started another parabola, so
I had to brace myself against the wall with one hand while holding
the barf bag with the other! :-( But I felt much better after that,
and wound up doing the experiment many more times. On the last
parabola, I even allowed Byron Lichtenburg (president of PSI, and
Payload Specialist on a couple of Shuttle flights), to turn me upside
down for the "cameras." (NASA photographers film each flight.) Then
they allowed me to watch the landing of the KC from the jumpseat in
the cockpit! Lots of fun.
After we landed, Tom and I decided that zero-G must be just like
childbirth--as soon as the experience is over, you forget all about
the pain (Tom had gotten sick, too), and you want to experience it
all over again!
After each flight, everyone files inside for a debriefing of the
experiments, and gets the plane/experiments ready for the next day.
Then everyone goes over to PeTe's (a cajun food joint) for the
traditional post-Comet-flight meal. The NASA TD told us at the start
how everyone is always very hungry after a flight, and how everyone
is shoveling food in their mouth with both hands, all the while
talking about throwing up. "And then we look around, and all the
tables next to us are empty--all the other customers have left!"
And it was true: I was STARVING by the time we landed. And yes, we
during the meal we all talked about vomiting!
So that's my tale of 0-g. I'd love to go again--I have some great
ideas for experiments, but I don't have access to a good lab to
create them...
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% From: [email protected]
% Date: 17 Aug 94 20:07:00 GMT
% To: [email protected]
% Subject: My Vomit Comet experience, part II
From: US1RMC::"[email protected]" "John Sotos" 18-AUG-1994 04:11:52.05
To: [email protected]
CC:
Subj: More on Vomit Comet
For the Vomit Comet veterans out there, a question that has bugged me
since I flew & threw over 10 years ago: Did anyone who took the
Scopolamine/Amphetamine anti-motion sickness medications notice any
"performance enhancement" afterwards?
After one of my flights I went running in a crowded Houston park and,
to my astonishment, passed *everyone*. I was not in great shape,
either. I think it was the amphetamine. (The post-flight ravenous
appetite cannot be explained by amphetamine, which is an appetite
depressant.)
Some grizzled Comet veterans told me the story about the bad batch of
airsick bags that was once used on the airplane. Seems the bottom seam
was not joined, so the vomit went straight through the bag and out the
bottom! Apparently, with every parabola, an increasing mass of
vomitus would arise, ghost-like, from the floor and float around!
Flying with and without the medications was like day and night. You
can't fight neurochemistry!
Note & Disclaimer: Only an idiot would use amphetamines or other drugs
to improve athletic performance.
John
[email protected]
% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Date: Thu, 18 Aug 94 0:37:06 PDT
% From: John Sotos <[email protected]>
% To: [email protected]
% Subject: More on Vomit Comet
From: US1RMC::"[email protected]" "Claudio Egalon"
18-AUG-1994 05:18:54.94
To: "[email protected]"
<[email protected]>, [email protected]
CC:
Subj: Re: My Vomit Comet experienc
Reply to: RE>My Vomit Comet experience
Shelley wrote:
=[Note: the parabolic flights the KC runs involve a climb with
=~50-60 degree deck angle, then a pushover to about the same angle
=down. In each parabola, there is about 22-24 seconds of nearly
=zero-G (micro-gravity, to be precise), then 55-65 seconds of pullout
=with a peak G-force of nearly 3 G's. Each day, the KC does 40
=parabolas; this takes around 2 hours.]
Actually the maximum angle is 45 degrees. 50 to 60 degrees is the
angle that NASA Lewis' Learjet, NASA 616, makes with the horizontal.
Last April when I flew the KC-135 the max G we got was 1.8. It pays
off to make things easier in the aircraft; it lasts longer... Similarly,
if you go for the Lear you can get a higher acceleration: 2.5 G's.
The number of parabolas depend, among other things, on the weather
conditions and how sick the passengers are. As far as I understand
the record number of parabolas for the KC-135 in a single mission
is around 105. My record number of parabolas is 68 in March 1993.
In general the KC-135 flies at least 40 parabolas.
=So the deal was, did we want to run experiments on the KC-135? We
=could run our own, or run others which were on backlog. The only
=catch was the price: $4000 for three days of the "Vomit Comet."
=So six of us got together to form two groups of three; each one
=of us would fly for only one day and pay 1/3 the amount.
Can anybody tell me how much does it cost to fly the KC-135? I suspect
that the total price tag is somewhere around US$ 5 to 10 K per hour. Of
course, the final price tag per experiment may get lower if you have
more than one experiment flying...
Claudio O. Egalon
% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Date: 17 Aug 1994 16:57:05 U
% From: "Claudio Egalon" <[email protected]>
% Subject: Re: My Vomit Comet experienc
From: US1RMC::"[email protected]" 18-AUG-1994 07:52:22.06
To: [email protected]
CC:
Subj: My Vomit Comet experience
Wow! I *am* impressed by the number of people who responded to me!
I reviewed my postings on the Vomit Comet, and edited them to
make them more relevant to this group and (and less to rec.aviation).
Here goes:
It all started in January 1989, when I received a letter from
netter/pilot/fellow-space-enthusiast Rich Kolker. Apparently, with
all the backlog of experiments to fly the Space Shuttle caused by the
Challenger accident, a company called Payload Systems, Inc., had a
bunch of people wanting to fly their experiments on the NASA 930,
KC-135 which PSI rents from NASA.
[Note: the parabolic flights the KC runs involve a climb with ~50-60
degree deck angle, then a pushover to about the same angle down. In
each parabola, there is about 22-24 seconds of nearly zero-G
(micro-gravity, to be precise), then 55-65 seconds of pullout with a
peak G-force of nearly 3 G's. Each day, the KC does 40 parabolas;
this takes around 2 hours.]
So the deal was, did we want to run experiments on the KC-135? We
could run our own, or run others which were on backlog. The only
catch was the price: $4000 for three days of the "Vomit Comet." So
six of us got together to form two groups of three; each one of us
would fly for only one day and pay 1/3 the amount.
We formed a non-profit company (whose goal was to fly experiments
for students), and set about finding experiments to fly. We also
had to complete much training before flying on the KC. As we would
be flying on an Air Force/NASA aircraft, we had to undergo physiological
training, as in the altitude chamber training that the AF folks do,
not the General Aviation training. (Some differences include training
on how to use parachutes, stress management; also, the AF chamber goes
up to 35,000' vs. 25K' in the GA chamber, so we could practice pressure
breathing.) But to do the AF phys. training, we had to first get an
AF flight physical. Coincidently, all six of us (scattered in
Virginia, Rhode Island, Illinois, and New Jersey) took the phys.
training the same day--May 17. Everything went well, until I wound up
with a blockage in one Eustacian (sp?) tube (probably from breathing
all that dry O2), and lacerated an eardrum. So I never got to do
the rapid decompression, but did everything else.
The next day I visited an Ear/Nose/Throat surgeon, who poked a small
hole in my eardrum (yow! Easily *the most* painful experience of my
life, even with a local--I can't imagine that childbirth would be more
painful!), suctioned out the blood on the other side, and placed a
1-mm tube in the hole to keep it open. This doctor used to be a Navy
flight surgeon...when I told him that I would be doing micro-gravity
experiments in a KC-135 in two weeks, he said, "You'll be doing
parabolic flights?" "Uh-huh," I replied. "Oh, you're going to throw
up," he said matter-of-factly. He said that there would be no problem
flying with the tube in my ear (in fact, I would not have any problem
equalizing pressure, since the middle ear was now open to the outside!).
The next week I took a friend's plane, flew up to RI to pick up one
member of our "team," then flew down to VA to pick up two more members.
We left VA early on Thursday, May 25, and arrived that evening (after
15 hours of flying in two days--11 on Thursday alone!).
The next day we unpacked our experiments, and started setting them up
in NASA's hangar. We had to hold a "Test Readiness Review" with NASA
and Payload Systems engineers, to make sure that our experiments were
not only safe but would actually work. (Note: the PSI folks had
already reviewed our experiments on paper a while back.) They suggested
some minor changes to our experiments, so we modified them and headed
back to our apartment complex and the pool! (Geez, Houston is hot and
humid!) Unfortunately, I couldn't put my head under water (due to the
tube in my eardrum), but immersing the rest of my body felt great!
BTW, one of the experiments, run for a bunch of sixth-graders, was to
take some goldfish (who have been neutral-buoyant for their entire lives)
into zero-G to see how they would react. Apparently, other similar
experiments have been run--the NASA test director was saying that they
found that there were basically three types of reactions from the
goldfish: some would do loops ("both inside and outside loops," in the
words of the NASA TD), some would do rolls, and others would just "kind
of stay in one place and just quivver a lot."
That evening everyone running experiments, plus the NASA and PSI folks,
all got together at The Olive Garden (an Italian restaurant--part of a
chain). Apparently, this is a traditional start-of-experiment-week
meal. There were folks from all over. I don't remember everyone, but
there were students and faculty from U. Kansas studying the effects of
microgravity on the immune system, and people from Canada (don't remember
where) who were studying details of vertigo.
The next few days were "off" days for us, so we got to tour around,
see Indiana Jones, etc. Tuesday we started putting our experiments in
the KC-135. It was HUGE! The flaps were larger than the wings on the
plane I fly! The inside of the KC is padded with 2" polyurethane foam,
as is everyone's experiment. Duct tape (the force that binds the
universe together :-)) abounds everywhere. The NASA folks who run the
show started to give us a hard time because some of us had cotton-duck
jumpsuits instead of the Nomex that they wanted. I thought it was kind
of silly given the toxic (in a fire) environment of the inside of the KC.
We finally get everything into place (in a plane with the A/C turned
off, outside on the tarmac in 95-degree temps! :-( ), and we went back
in the hangar for some briefings.
First we got our medication for our flights. Actually, there's two
separate meds we get. One is Scopalamine, to prevent motion sickness.
(This is what they give the astronauts.) The other is Dexedrine (yes,
"speed"), to counteract the drowsiness effect of Scopalamine. Then we
get our safety briefing for the KC. ("There are four emergency escape
doors, this is how you use the escape ropes, this is how you use the
parachutes [which were no longer being used on the plane], etc., etc.")
One of the more amusing part of the briefing was the comment, "perhaps
the worst thing you can do on the KC-135 is throw up and not use the
vomit bag." Speaking of which, they have a big box with lots of barf
bags. Everyone took handfuls of the bags, and stuffed them into all
pockets of their jumpsuits.
----------To be continued----------------------
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% To: [email protected]
% Subject: My Vomit Comet experience
From: US1RMC::"[email protected]" "MAIL-11 Daemon"
18-AUG-1994 11:48:40.14
To: [email protected]
CC:
Subj: Re: More on Vomit Comet
John Sotos <[email protected]> wrote:
>For the Vomit Comet veterans out there, a question that has
>bugged me since I flew & threw over 10 years ago: Did anyone
>who took the Scopolamine/Amphetamine anti-motion sickness
>medications notice any "performance enhancement" afterwards?
I've flown both with and without meds, and I have roughly the same
symptoms both ways. I didn't notice any "high" from the dexedrine,
but one of my symptoms is post-flight malaise. After a KC-135 flight,
I'll take the afternoon off and sleep for a couple of hours. I know
I'll be no good at work. I start to feel human again about 4 PM.
John continued:
>Flying with and without the medications was like day and
>night. You can't fight neurochemistry!
I seem to be about the same, with and without, but scop-dex helps most
people. Go figure.
If anybody wants more hard data on the KC-135 experience, I've posted a
hypertext document (with pictures) on the World Wide Web at:
http://sd-www.jsc.nasa.gov/kc-135.html
-- Ken Jenks, NASA/JSC/SD5, Space Biomedical Research Institute
[email protected] (713) 483-4368
"There's no sensation to compare with this
Suspended animation, A state of bliss
Can't keep my eyes from the circling skies
Tongue-tied and twisted just an earth-bound misfit, I"
-- Pink Floyd, "Learning to Fly"
from album "Momentary Lapse of Reason"
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% Reply-To: [email protected]
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