Australia just flew its own ‘vomit comet’. It’s a big deal for zero-gravity space research

Header image: Steve Gale (pilot) and Gail Iles (right) next to the Marchetti jet. Kieran Blair, Author provided

Gail Iles, RMIT University

Last Saturday, a two-seater SIAI-Marchetti S.211 jet took off from Essendon Fields Airport in Melbourne with an expert aerobatic pilot at the controls and a case full of scientific experiments in the passenger seat.

Pilot Steve Gale took the jet on Australia’s first commercial “parabolic flight”, in which the plane flies along the path of a freely falling object, creating a short period of weightlessness for everyone and everything inside.

Parabolic flights are often a test run for the zero-gravity conditions of space. This one was operated by Australian space company Beings Systems, which plans to run regular commercial flights in coming years.

As Australia’s space program begins to take off, flights like these will be in high demand.

The experiments aboard the flight were small packages developed by space science students at RMIT University. As program manager of RMIT’s space science degree, I have been teaching these students for the past three years, preparing them for a career in the Australian space industry.

The experiments investigate the effect of zero gravity on plant growth, crystal growth, heat transfer, particle agglomeration, foams and magnetism.

Scientific phenomena behave differently in zero gravity than in labs on Earth. This is important for two main reasons.

First, zero gravity, or “microgravity”, provides a very “clean” environment in which to conduct experiments. By removing gravity from the system, we can study a phenomenon in a more “pure” state and thus understand it better.

Second, microgravity platforms such as parabolic flights, sounding rockets and drop towers