Who hasn’t dreamed of flying?
That dream recently became a reality for Kurt Miltenberger, an eighth-grade algebra teacher at Tommie Kunst Junior High School in Santa Maria.
Miltenberger was one of 54 California math and science teachers selected to participate in the Northrop Grumman Foundation Weightless Flights of Discovery program.
The local teacher almost didn’t get to experience zero gravity, however. The day before he was scheduled to attend an orientation workshop in San Jose, his wife gave birth to the couple’s third child. Reluctant to leave his family at such an important time, Miltenberger arranged with the company to do the workshop over the phone.
Shortly after learning about the parabolic flight plan and receiving tips on how to handle motion sickness, Miltenberger arrived at San Jose International Airport ready for his flight.
Dressed in bright blue, astronaut-grade jumpsuits, Miltenberger and a small group of other teachers were able to experience several states of gravity, including Martian gravity, lunar gravity, and zero gravity.
“It was crazy,” Miltenberger said of weightlessness. “It was a really odd sensation. It kind of felt like floating in a pool, except you couldn’t direct yourself.”
It was because of that element of control, Miltenberger said, that he enjoyed lunar gravity the most.
“There was one guy who could jump over 15 people and then come down,” he said.
Established in 2006, the Northrop Grumman Foundation Weightless Flights of Discovery program is designed to inspire students to pursue science and technical degrees by first inspiring their teachers, according to northropgrumman.com. The foundation teamed up with the Zero Gravity Corporation, also known as Zero G, a privately owned space entertainment and tourism company, to send the teachers flying. The zero-gravity flights usually run about $5,000 per person, but came free of charge thanks to the program.
During the flights, teachers are allowed to conduct and film several scientific experiments that they can later share with their students. Originally, Miltenberger had planned to use his son’s Hot Wheels cars and track to record how far the cars could travel in each gravitational state. But the Hot Wheels never made it on the plane.
“[The airline] said it could be used as a deadly weapon,” Miltenberger said.
Instead, Miltenberger observed some of the other teachers’ experiments and conducted some with equipment provided by the foundation and Zero G.
“We got to play with water, throw it around and watch it stay in little globules,” he said.
The teachers also got to play Martian basketball and experiment with wind-up toys.
Upon returning to Santa Maria, Miltenberger described his experience to his students, and studied the parabolic flight plan and its relation to weightlessness.
“They were bummed that I didn’t get to do the experiment,” he said.
He got a big reaction, however, from his stories about teachers who threw up.
“They just thought that was hilarious,” he said.
One student in Miltenberger’s algebra and AVID classes said that her favorite part was when he described what it felt like to fly.
“It was pretty cool learning what it would feel like to go up in Zero G,” she said. “He went into a lot of detail about the sensations and what he could do [at each gravitational state].”
And even though Miltenberger didn’t get to do his experiment, his students still had their estimations about what the different states would do to the cars.
Two of them theorized that the cars would have traveled farthest in lunar gravity.
Contact Staff Writer Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 2-9, 2008.