I mentioned yesterday that although NASA refers to the plane as the Weightless Wonder, it is most commonly known as the Vomit Comet.  In our first video conference with our flight team, our flight mentor answered the question that we were all dying to know: How many people actually get sick on the flight?  His answer was that if three people were to board right now and fly, one would become violently sick, one would be mildly sick, and one would be fine.  My first thought is that I'm going to be in a lot of trouble.  Then he reassures us by saying that before we go they will give us medicine that reduces the likelihood of becoming sick.  So now if 10 people were to fly with the medication, only one would become mildly sick.  I think I can handle being mildly sick in zero gravity...
In order to help us prepare as a team, we have video conferences every two weeks since we are spread over different states.  I'll be honest with you, I do use my video conferences as a bragging point, but who wouldn't?  "Oh, sorry.  I have need to be on my way.  I have a video conference with NASA."  We have only had one so far, but we have another tag-up this Thursday.  We use these times to ask questions or talk about things that are pertinent to our assignments.  These past two weeks, our team had to edit some intense paperwork for approval to fly.  It is probably fairly easy for those who have done the paperwork before, but we had quite a few emails between the five of us trying to edit an existing copy.  This was the easy part to understand...there were pictures and simple words...

The cool part of our video conferences, though, is seeing what we'll be doing in less than two months:

Those boxes are what our experiments are going to be in.  They have little arm holes like they have for babies in NICU.  If our experiments weren't inside those clear boxes, then we would spend our entire flight time floating around trying to catch all the pieces.  This is what we'll be spending a lot of our parabolas doing.  The last few parabolas we spend testing an item of our choosing to see how it reacts in different gravities. 

This girl brought a pedometer to see how it would work.  So I've been thinking and asking my family, friends, and students to think of things that I could bring along with me on my flight that can fit inside my flight suit pocket on my leg.  We wear the green ones, instead of the cool blue ones just in case you were wondering.  And we checked, we don't get to keep the flight suit, but there is an aviation store across the road from Ellington Field (where our flight will depart and land) that we could probably find one at.  I think that greeting my kids in a flight suit would be a hysterical way to start off the school year.