Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking—world-famous for his work on black holes, his book A Brief History of Time, and his life with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease)—is scheduled to take a flight on Zero Gravity Corp.’s commercial version of the Vomit Comet.
Of the upcoming flight, Hawking said “As someone who has studied gravity and black holes all of my life, I am excited to experience firsthand weightlessness and a zero-gravity environment.” Hawking’s flight is scheduled for 26 April, and will take place at the Kennedy Space Center landing strip Zero Gravity uses.
The Florida-based company offers trips on their Boeing 727, which flies to 32,000 feet, and then dives to 8,000 feet, offering passengers 25 seconds of zero gravity on each down arc (followed by a 1.8g pull-out). Seats on the flights normally cost $3,750, but Zero Gravity will be picking up the tab for Hawking’s flight.
In a somewhat related story, Sir Richard Branson has offered to personally pay for a seat for Hawking on Virgin Galactic‘s suborbital passenger spaceship, which is expected to fly starting in 2009. Branson joined forces with Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites (the company which won the X-Prize with its SpaceShipOne in 2004) to build a larger version of the vehicle to fly seven passengers into space. Reservations for the $200,000 seats are currently being taken. Hawking had publicly expressed a desire to fly into space last year.