Embry Riddle Aeronautical University students Ed Springer, Sarah Kazukiewicz and I sat against a padded wall in our NASA flight suits as the KC135 rose higher in the Monday morning sky on its way toward Mexico. We heard the five minute warning, checked that our gear was strapped down and looked around at the students' experiments designed for microgravity. We heard the two minute warning and waited.

Suddenly our backs slid up against the wall and our feet came off the ground. Sarah's face reflected her delight. "I feel like my stomach is floating up to my head!" With her feet above her blonde floating hair, the Engineering and Physics major then explained to a NASA video camera how her team was testing a switch that is activated in microgravity.

"Feet Down," shouted John Yaniec, the NASA Flight Director. Two G forces pushed down on us. After the flight, Ed recalled that " I felt like my brain was being compressed into the bottom of my head. Then in Zero G, my brain releases back to the top --like the spring in our experiment."

The plane porpoises through the sky in parabolic arcs to create brief periods of weightlessness--up to thirty seconds at a time. As I spin like a floating whirling dervish, I see a cabin full of college students from Alabama, California, Wisconsin, Texas and Florida conducting experiments. I look over and see Ed, his horizontal body levitating a foot off the plane's floor, watching the spring go up and connect a circuit that activates a magnetic field that helps bring a screw head and screw driver closer together. He sees great potential in his experimental switch for remote construction on satellites and spacecraft without risking human life.

But the flight to human knowledge is not always smooth. Both Sarah and Ed get walloped by motion sickness. Sarah goes to sit in the back of the plane where others have proceeded her. The screw in their experiment has also gotten stuck so it doesn't look like anything is happening anymore, "even though we proved that the switch works," said Ed. He valiantly rallies and rises to the level of other students exploring aerial gymnastics. Limbs carve the air, as we learn to fly using our arms as wings.

Below us, classroom ideas and theories in science and engineering are being tested in this unique environment. While planning their project, Sarah couldn't believe how much we take gravity for granted in everyday life. Ed added: "When you take the variable of gravity out of the equations, you come up with numbers that you don't think are real."

Motion sickness won't stop Sarah. She has wanted to be an astronaut since the fifth grade, and she worked this summer at Space Camp in Florida. She will go back up in the KC135 a second day along with Ed and their teammate Shiju Nadir, another talented aspiring astronaut. They will test their switch with a robotic arm they built. And they will again test themselves for long winks of "weightless wonder. "

For one more day, they will escape gravity. Ed with his visions of building in space; Shiju and Sarah with their dreams of being astronauts. The sky is not their limit.

Tomorrow: Ed, Sarah and Shiju tell their own story.