CLEVELAND — Just before zero gravity kicked in, I was plastered to the padded floor of an airplane with nearly twice Earth’s gravity pushing down on me.

The feeling in my stomach was similar to what you feel as a rollercoaster tips over the peak of its first and highest hill.

But instead of a blast of wind and speed, I was suddenly, gently floating.

It’s an awesome feeling of freedom.

About 40 of us were briefly unfettered from the limits of gravity aboard G-Force One on Sunday as part of the plane’s visit to the Great Lakes Science Center for two flights this weekend.

We turned somersaults in midair, gobbled floating droplets of water and chased down M&Ms as they whizzed through the cabin.

Since there’s no gravity, it’s hard to control momentum. Push off too hard and you’d careen into someone else, an experiment or hovering drops of stray water.

There’s also the real fear of motion sickness — the plane NASA uses for weightless flights isn’t dubbed the “Vomit Comet” for nothing — but only a few of those aboard seemed to feel any discomfort and my stomach didn’t so much as grumble.

The science center spent two years working to get G-Force One to Cleveland’s Burke Lakefront Airport to send science teachers, students, journalists and others aloft to experience and experiment with weightlessness.

The modified Boeing 727-200, operated by Zero Gravity Corp., is the only commercial weightlessness experience in the United States. Beyond that you’d be left trying to convince NASA or some other government entity to take you up.

It’s not, as the organizers and training video point out repeatedly, a simulation. It’s weightlessness, using the same science that NASA has used to train astronauts in zero gravity for decades.

The plane flies out to a designated strip of airspace about 100 miles long by 10 miles wide — in our case above Lake Ontario — and at about 24,000 feet begins to fly upward at a 45-degree angle. At around 34,000 feet, the plane noses down and for about 30 seconds the rules of gravity shift.

The parabolics, as the arcs flown by the plane are known, can be used to simulate Martian gravity (1/3 what it is on Earth), lunar gravity (1/6 what it is on our planet) and, of course, the pure weightlessness that you’d get if you were in space.

On the Martian and lunar parabolics there isn’t complete weightlessness, but you don’t weigh anything near what you do in regular gravity. You truly could leap tall buildings in a single bound if there weren’t a roof above you.

I’ll admit to a bit of trepidation when I volunteered to take a ride on G-Force One, but that was trumped by the chance for adventure and excitement. I’ll never be an astronaut after all, but I had my childhood dreams.

“It was the most amazing experience ever,” said Keihen Kitchen, a 14-year-old Cleveland Schools freshman who won a trip on the flight through an essay contest at her school, which meets at the science center.

It’s definitely up there on the life list for me as well, but one that was nearly lost on Saturday, when we were originally supposed to fly. We were in the plane, we were at the designated airspace, we were on the floor of the plane waiting for the first parabolic to begin when weather forced the pilots to turn around.

On the heart monitor worn by teacher Nathan Smith on the first flight, the crushing disappointment caused a spike of about 20 heartbeats per minute as the news sunk in Saturday, said Chris Hartenstine, an educational projects coordinator at NASA’s Glenn Research Center.

Hartenstine, who was experimenting with the monitor on the flights, wore it Sunday and said he saw spikes in his own heart rate when the pilots started flying the parabolics — one for Martian gravity, two in lunar gravity and 12 of total weightlessness.

Fortunately, the weather broke Sunday and I soared.

Contact Brad Dicken at 329-7147 or bdicken@chroniclet.com.

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