I was weightlessness ....

No drug of the world can shift one into the condition of absolute weightlessness. No, who wants to fly as in the dream, must drive to Moscow and rise into the Cosmonaut Trainings Centre of Star City, the GCTC. Then, he has to go inside an Ilyushin 76 MDK, which some people called “the vomit bomber”.

It is as in an American war film: We sit in the loading space of an air freighter and we were flown to the target area. The first mission. In Hollywood there would be a close-up of the faces now. All are silent. Strained silence.

Nevertheless this gladly times, I would say a word now: My parachute cuts me into the shoulders. The thing is many more heavily, than I had thought, dearest I secretly the belts would loosen. But the Chief Instructor, which looks like a third Klitschko brother, would not permit that certainly. Thus: Teeth together. Silence. The way in the target area cannot be so far any longer.

We are in an Russian Ilyushin 76 MDK. A four-jet, enormous transportation machine with a span of more than 50 meters. It smells insides a little as in a gym-hall at school. The soil of the loading space is lined with soft, dark-green mats. There! Few edges of old marks. Determined only water marks? Or? Fast enough to move the eyes away from this. There is a kind command conditions at that the cockpit turned side: loud instruments, switches, pointers and small lamps. Otherwise nothing. No windows, no seats, no hostesses, no snacks. Those would be a little attached.

We are on the way into weightlessness. There are somebody, whose stomach becomes lighter also. Our group: a hand of fully space-crazy Germans and a married couple from Poland, probably also space-crazy. The youngest of us goes still to the school, the oldest is pensioner. We are all checked at home from a physician, before we was leaving Germany and other countries, and before we could have the famous “Zero G Certificate” in our hands. Experts say "Zero g flight", because the force of gravity, physically G, is here occasional zero (thus "zero"). A Zero g flight is not anything for people, who are sitting over the hole day on armchair stools, nothing for soft eggs. You have to be in good fitness conditions.

You are fit. You are fit. You are fit. Are you fit? The word chains rotate in my head. Andreas, our Zero g experienced group leader, said yesterday: One must get involved in weightlessness. And little a self-confident its also needed. Then it goes very well with the stomach.

Two days before we had arrived a good bus hour far away from Moscow and northeast from there to Star City. In a close fir forest the centre of Russian space flgiht hides itself. Since 1966 here are trained all cosmonauts. Star City looks like, as if possibly that somehow threw onto the with asphalted some hands fully yellow multistoried latch plates into the forest. 6500 humans live here, technicians, scientists, physicians, beginning cosmonauts, cosmonauts in the retirement and the American Greg Olsen. He has to pay 20 million $US for a tourist flight in the universe, and he is here since months and trained his step out yard. The children of the city don't want to be a firefighter or become a nurse, they want to fly into space. They learn from beginning of the second school-class English. Few of them could it create.

At the moment, 39 student-cosmonauts trained six and a half long years for to be a real cosmonaut. Then fly - perhaps. The Russian Space Agency has not enough money. Therefore Star City offered Zero-G flights for tourists. Russia sent only 98 humans into the universe - thus rather few compared - with the 272 US astronauts, but Russians spent more than five times as much time as the Americans in the universe, “do you have understood this, yes?”, the Russian guide had explained, a resolute lady of the appearance of a Mireille Mathieu (French singer) aged in speed of light, she had led us trough the strictly guarded area of Star City.

The most famous inhabitant of the city was called Juri Gagarin and flew as first human to the universe. That was 1961. Gagarin is pervasive. He stands as enormous statue at the first large crossing of Star City, and he lives in the heads of the native ones. In addition he has its own museum, in which beside many artefacts from Russian space travel is issued. Something of this items belongs to Juri Gagarin: his fired wallet. 1968 Gagarin died in an flight accident. "Unfortunately", Mireille Mathieu had said, “Gagarin was looking very expressed and he was a very good looking man.” In the museum still another photo hangs beside the wallet: three trees, whose treetop looked like cutted - the place, at which his MIG went to soil. There we fly exactly now:

Inside Ilyushin, with well 750 kilometres per hour. The Russians still practice over the same area test at once. Northeast from Moscow, an air space of 2000 x 2000 kilometres is approved to use by military for everything, which is elsewhere strictly forbidden. Zero g flights for example, also called parabola flights. During a parabola flight the airplane rises with an angle from 45 to 50 degrees into the sky, from 6000 to 9500 meters altitude. The pilot takes the throttle away above and lets the airplane tip. Then in the same angle again 3000 meters against the earth. Later the pilot intercepts and changes some seconds the machine again into the straight flight. Up to the next parabola. In the period between full throttle, taking away the throttle and intercepting, there is absolute weightlessness to about 25 to 30 seconds inside the airplane. Humans in the airplane fall just as fast towards to the soil as the airplane. You can buy this adventure, for example with offerers such Space Travellers in the Internet. And in such a way I sit now, in the midst of my small German/Polish travel's group, in the padded loading space of a Russian jet and wait for the astronaut feeling.

A parabola flight is aeronautically very fastidious. A pilot steers thereby only the hight-rudder, another only the side-rudder. And naturally substitutes stand ready, if possibly one of the personnel become consciousness (which never happens). Besides there is a physician on board and seven instructors so mentioned, through-trained Russians, Cosmonaut Trainer. Andreas had said at the day before: You have to follow their instructions. One of the instructors shows us special signs, that means for us now: We can remove the parachutes, which are prescribed when starting. I feel incomprehensibly easy already now. The instructors show us, how we are to get over the first parabola: sitting on the soil, the backs to behind. We hold on to a bar, which runs along like a railing at the airplane inner wall.

Then everything goes very fast. The maneuver begins with tiny stalling. Two seconds the feeling, which one knows from the car, if one drives very fast over a hilly road. The airplane lowers the nose completely briefly, around momentum to take up for the climb. Then it goes uphill. The engines roar. Strange to say thereby, the airplane soil seems to me in no way bent and it slips despite the 45-degree angle, also not all humans fallen into the rear airplane part. But on my side, so far, I feel a completely unknown power, a strength presses me to soil. As a monster jumped on my shoulders. It seems to me in such a way, as if even the meat of my cheeks moved towards soil; I can keep head upright to mine, it twice as heavy hardly - in the climb two G, the double terrestrial attraction force prevail. And then becomes it track-send brightly.

The spotlights in the loading space signals: Zero g. My blood, which had driven the force of gravity evenly still into my toes, rushes now back into my head. But which is that? My legs are completely easy, where are at all my legs? There are they. Before me, over me! That cannot be, that these are my legs! Yes!

I keep still the bar clasped and turn inexorably upward - where is actually above, if there is none down? -, until I make hand conditions on the bar. I want again back, but I cannot steer. Swimming movements do not use anything in weightlessness. Everything is easy. So incomprehensibly easily. It is so beautiful, I could die for now!

But I do not die. From the loudspeakers the instructors instead in hard Russian ordered, to pick us again from to the soil. I hardly lie on the mat, intercept the pilot the machine, and I am pressed again with two G on the soil. The wings of the Ilyushin - I have heard later - to bend itself with this maneuver in each case three and a half meter through, like bamboo in the wind. After some seconds we fly again straightforward. My first parabola is ended.

Short self-check. Pulse: accelerated. Stomach: stably. Brain: as on drug. What for hell was that?

The second parabola. All become more courageous, up to Poland, which use their bags however very shy. Again, the blood rushes at the beginning in my ears. Again everything becomes easily. It is the same feeling, which one has in the airplane, if the holiday-jet flies through turbulences. Also sometimes there it pulls to one for a lash impact to the cab cover. During the parabola flight this feeling increases in the infinite. I am completely weightless. During this, I use the time to look around me. The others catch on to float, the instructors their feet in loops on the soil hooked. Dust grains stand before me in air. I repel myself from the wall, fly to the cover, repel me again and stick at the other wall. An instructor pulls me again down. How quickly, please, do 30 seconds pass?

Still eight further parabolas w fly, then the pilots break off: An gale approaches. I ran at the cover, made salti, an instructor have mean bodies shifted and then like a cannon ball by the area shot me in rotation. I flew with spread arms, as in the dreams of my childhood. I was weightlessly like humans in the universe I have shouted out because of luck. And, no, I did not vomit. It was not even bad for me. On the return flight again all are silent. The Polish people exhaust their vomit bags. In quiet euphoria we lie on the soil and hardly notice that those remounts Ilyushin sometime on the soil. Now we still down-climb the ladder, purely into the bus and from the airfield directly in the hotel. There I fall asleep, for several hours, in the bright afternoon. My body is at the end. When I was waking up, there was a question jumped trough my brain: How long will I remember? How long my muscles and my nerves will remember? To the feeling, to be forced only by my brain and without heavyless?

I have to go up there again!

Our man in Star City: The great dream of Andreas P. Bergweiler

Bergweiler applies for us in the European and world-wide scene of the space travel-inspired as light shape - as the man with the large dream. Bergweiler was the first civilian at all, who was allowed to participate in a Russian cosmonaut training: he practiced 2001 with cosmonaut landings in the water. Since then, he has a few dozens parabola flights behind himself, a centrifuge training and a High Altitude flight, with which one ascends with a jet on 32 kilometres height - to the edge of space.

From there one sees Earth's curvature, and the sky is black. Since Star City opened the gates also for foreigners, Bergweiler is a gladly seen guest there - and whenever a German travel's group booked a space experience, Bergweiler participates as competent guide. And each day in the cosmonaut training center takes him nearer a step to his large dream: to the flight in the universe, dearest in a Soyuz spaceship to the International Space Station ISS, on the traces of space tourists, such as Dennis Tito or Mark Shuttleworth, or - Juri A. Gagarin.

However: There are missing the necessary 20 million dollar. From the necessary trainings Bergweiler completed most anyhow. Now the sponsor is only missing. "Sometime", he told and he is safe, "recognizes someone that how perfect for a advertisement figure a private man is in the universe! A normal guy!”

Text: Alexander Boeker - leading editor/department leader of “modern life” of the magazine MAX
Photography: Arne Mueller

Report appeared in the MAX “BIG” expenditure on 23.09.2004

[publication with friendly permission MAX]