Why do you readily accept that a vomit comet can only give us 25 to 30 seconds of Zero G?
Because to simulate weightlessness, the plane has to fly towards the ground in a parabolic arc (a ballistic trajectory), starting in a shallow dive but getting deeper as your body accelerates towards the ground.
Remember that absent any air resistance, Earth's gravity
accelerates you towards the ground at a rate of 9.8 m/s
2 - that is, for each second you fall, your velocity increases by 9.8 m/s (neglecting air resistance). So for each second of the flight, the plane has to go into a steeper dive to keep up with how fast you are falling. After 30 seconds or so the plane loses over 4 km (~14,000 ft) of altitude. After 45 seconds you lose almost 10 kilometers (~32,000 ft), which is close to the cruising altitude of most commercial aircraft. A full 60 seconds would require over 17 kilometers (~58,000 feet), which is significantly higher than what most commercial aircraft reach.
And remember, it takes time to pull out of a dive, and the steeper the dive, the longer it takes and the more stress it puts on the airframe. 30 seconds is a practical limit that saves wear and tear on the aircraft and the crew. To get 45 seconds you'd have to start at a much higher altitude than typical cruising altitude to give you enough room to pull out of the dive.
A full 60 seconds is pretty much out of the question. It just takes too much altitude.
Those planes are essentially commercial flights to give members of the public a chance to experience weightlessness, so it’s obvious that these planes are flying well within their safety limits. What would these planes be capable of if they were pushed to their limits and beyond? You all need to give yourselves a shake and stop swallowing everything you are told at face value and use your noggin and apply a bit of logic for a change.
I'm not sure you could push it much beyond 30 seconds unless you start at a significantly higher altitude and were willing to put that much more stress on the airframe.
Why are all the clips so short? With all the hours of on-board footage, why would they not put the camera down once in a while and leave it running while they went about their business? Show me an Apollo astronaut floating around the capsule for three minutes and I may need to have a rethink, so until then, stop posting these ridiculous vomit comet videos.
They had a limited amount of film that was intended to capture scientific and engineering data, not home movies of astronauts just floating around the capsule. And remember, for many of these clips the camera was undercranked (shooting less than 24 frames per second), so some clips do capture several minutes worth of activity, even if it only plays back in less than a minute. The Apollo 10 footage I linked was shot at 12 frames/second (I think), so that bit where they're playing with the flashlights is actually a couple of minutes long.
Here’s that clip with sound at around 6 minutes in. What’s that background noise? Is it the air conditioning, or maybe it’s just audio interference. It can’t be an aircraft engine because they are in space, right?
Fans, pumps, hiss from the audio track itself (analog media, remember). And every time you dupe a tape to another tape (as they would have done for this presentation), the problem only gets worse. Back in high school I played with "multitrack" recording by bouncing between two stereo tape decks - I'd play the left and right channels from the playback deck into the left channel of the recoding deck, and then played whatever instrument into the right channel of the recording deck. To lay down another track I'd swap tapes between the decks. You couldn't do more than 3 swaps before the accumulated noise was unbearable
1. When I got a job and could buy expensive things for myself, the very first thing I got was a 6-track tape deck. Made a lot of really unfortunate music on that puppy.
1. That, and the speed of the two decks was slightly different, so after each swap you had to tune upwards a little bit.
