Stephen Hawking took his planned zero-gravity airplane flight yesterday, 26 April 2007. See this article. Flying on Zero Gravity Corp.‘s modified Boeing 727 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, Hawking, his doctor, and three nurses flew eight zero-g parabolas.
“It was amazing,” Hawking said after the flight. “The zero-G part was wonderful and the full-G part was no problem. I could have gone on and on.” There had been some concern before the flight that his body might have difficulty with the high-gravity pull-outs at the end of each zero-g dive. “Space, here I come,” he added.
“Many people have asked me why I am taking this flight. I am doing it for many reasons,” Hawking said before the flight. “First of all, I believe that life on Earth is at an ever increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space.”
Charles Simonyi, the fifth space tourist (see this article) made a safe landing on the Kazakh steppes on 21 April, after 13 days in space.
Originally scheduled to land a day earlier, the return trip was postponed because of concerns that spring floodwaters in the usual landing area could complicate the landing. Instead, the landing was at a reserve site about 85 miles northeast of Zhezkazgan, in central Kazakhstan, (250 miles south of the capital, Astana). The Zhezkazgan site has rarely been used since the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Simonyi’s crewmates on the return flight were American astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, returning from a seven-month stay on the International Space Station.
The 58-year-old software billionaire launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome on 7 April with cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Oleg Kotov, who remained on the station. He was the fifth paying space tourist to the International Space Station, following Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth, Gregory Olsen, and Anousheh Ansari—all of whom took flights brokered by Space Adventures. Before this era of space tourism, Briton Helen Sharman took a trip to the Soviet space station Mir that she won through a contest in 1991, and a Japanese journalist traveled to Mir in 1990 with a ticket that reportedly cost $12 million.
Simonyi’s blog, Charles in Space, is still available.