WASHINGTON
— NASA awarded Zero Gravity Corp. a $4.7 million, one-year contract to conduct
parabolic flights aboard its specially modified Boeing 727 jetliner to provide
brief periods of weightlessness for agency experiments and personnel.
Since 2004,
Las Vegas-based Zero
Gravity Corp., or Zero-G, has been using the its G-Force One aircraft to
provide the weightless experience to paying customers including physicist
Stephen Hawking and domestic-living maven Martha Stewart.
The NASA
contract, announced Jan. 2, could be worth as much as $25.4 million if the
agency exercises all four one-year options.
NASA plans
to use the flights, departing primarily from the agency's Johnson Space Center
in Houston and Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, to conduct a variety of
microgravity experiments and help prepare astronauts for flights on the space
shuttle and International Space Station, the agency said in a release.
Zero-G
submitted a bid for the flight contract last year after NASA said it was
looking for alternatives to operating its own parabolic aircraft, as it has
done for decades.
NASA plans
to continue to conduct microgravity flights aboard its own C-9 aircraft for the
time being, agency spokeswoman Tabatha Thompson said. She said the Zero-G
flights would complement NASA's in-house capability.
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