What will I learn?

In our two-day course, we provide several hours of ground school taught by professionals with decades of space system experience, in addition to the weightless flight training. For both courses, we include classroom sessions on mobility and stability techniques in weightlessness. For IVA 301, in the design portion of the ground school, you will also learn design principles for intravehicular activity habitat, work stations, crew aids and crew equipment. Students will discuss design and operations requirements with our experienced teaching staff, examine design solutions in current use by NASA and the Russian crewed program, and review the development history resulting in those solutions.

Following this, we provide a thorough briefing on the aircraft and associated training equipment, the objectives of each weightless exercise, the flight scenario and procedures, physiological considerations, and in-flight safety. This includes a pre-flight walk through of the tasks and techniques to be practiced in the weightless environment.

Aboard the aircraft, you will perform several tasks representative of on-orbit crew activities during several weightless parabolas. These will include:

1. Free floating (both courses)
2. Translation along a hand rail, including turnaround (both courses)
3. Transferring a mass along the hand rail (both courses)
4. Use of an ingress/egress foot restraint (IVA 301)
5. Evaluation of reach envelope in foot restraints (IVA 301)
6. Performance of maintenance tasks in foot restraints (IVA 301)
7. Evaluation of toe loop foot restraint mobility (IVA 301)
8. Writing tasks (IVA 301)
9. Keyboard entry tasks (IVA 301)

In addition to these assigned tasks, you will be provided with an opportunity to perform your own weightless maneuvers and experiments, subject only to approval by Interglobal/Weaver personnel (for safety reasons). Because the weightless experience has been limited to only a few people in the past, there are many activities that have never been performed in the weightless environment that you may want to put into our official record book.

Upon course completion, you will receive a certificate (currently in the process of accreditation by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the International Astronautical Federation, as well as several universities) and a video of your weightless experience. You will also bring home with you your bound ground-school notebook and a detailed, bound set of the lecture materials, as well as a numbered Interglobal first-course mission patch for jackets or flight suits.

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