The science of the puke-filled space date on 'The Bachelor'
The Bachelor got a little spacey on Monday night.
Bachelor Nick Viall and contestant Vanessa Grimaldi, a special education teacher from Montreal, took a flight aboard a plane that designed to simulate the feeling of weightlessness you get in space.
All in all, it's a pretty nerdy outing for a show that once sent a contestant on a Cinderella date. Clearly The Bachelor contains multitudes.
"I knew that something like this did exist, but I thought it was only for the astronauts to practice on, so today, I am an astronaut," Grimaldi charmingly said before boarding the plane.
The two lovebirds flew aboard the Zero Gravity Corporation's G-Force One plane, a modified Boeing 727 with most of its seats removed and padding lining the interior of the plane.
Here's how it works:
The plane flies in a series of parabolic arcs that create about 30 seconds of weightlessness every time the 727 is on the downslope of the parabola. You can think of it as a roller coaster without the rails 24,000 feet to 32,000 feet up in the sky.
During those weightless 30 seconds, passengers can get up, jump around and do flips to feel what it would be like to be onboard the International Space Station or any other spacecraft in orbit.
When the plane is on the upswing of the parabola, passengers can't do much of anything.
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Viall and Grimaldi had to lie down on their backs as twice the weight of Earth's gravity bore down upon them while the plane headed toward the top of the arc at a 45-degree angle.
Flights usually last for about 15 parabolas total.
For the most part, a flight on a Zero Gravity plane is a pretty easy, breezy ride, though it can be disorienting.
The closest analog your body probably has to the feeling of weightlessness created during these flights is falling, so the automatic response for many people is to flail around.
Full disclosure: I took a ride in a Zero-G plane a few years back, and while I had a great time, I also couldn't figure out how to move my body in weightlessness. I did, indeed, try to dog paddle my way through the air. (It didn't work.)
Viall and Grimaldi seemed to take to the weightlessness of the flight better than I did, however. The two reality TV stars bounced around, flipped and twirled like pros.
That is, until Grimaldi learned first-hand why NASA's plane made for parabolic flights was nicknamed the "vomit comet" by members of the press.
Grimaldi puked a few times during her flight, which isn't unusual. About one in three people who flew aboard NASA's vomit comet got sick on their first flight, according to NASA.
It's true that these flights were limited in the earlier days of the space program, but now Zero-G Corporation (which is a separate entity from NASA) flies whoever has the willpower (and the money) to book a ticket.
You too can experience the nausea-inducing weightlessness of a zero-g flight. The company sells seats aboard their planes for $4,950.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
