January 2007
	People

Rocket Man

He soars through the air with the greatest of ease, he’s a teacher released from the force of the g’s.

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When offered the rare chance to experience the feeling of being weightless in space, Virginia high school teacher Alex Turner (shown upside down) seized the opportunity. Last fall, about 240 lucky fliers from in and around Washington, D.C.; Huntsville, Alabama; San Diego; and Cleveland boarded specially modified Boeing 727s for Northrop Grumman’s inaugural Weightless Flights of Discovery program.

Designed to get educators excited about teaching science or touting science careers, the program included pre-flight workshops in which they crafted experiments for the flight. Then came the main event: Following the path of a parabola—think of an upside-down U—the flying educators became weightless for approximately 25 seconds at a time. The aircraft rose and fell 15 times over two hours.

Turner teaches government at Reston, Virginia’s, South Lakes High School. Because he volunteers at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in nearby Chantilly, Virginia, program organizers thought he was a natural for the trip. His experiment required fastening a clear plastic bag filled with materials to the side of the aircraft and filming its movement amid intense 1.8 g-forces and during weightlessness.

“When you went weightless, you didn’t realize it until there was no floor below you,” Turner chuckles. “When I stood up, it was more than enough force to bounce my head against the ceiling.” 

—NATALIE McGILL