TikTok star researcher Kellie Gerardi on a parabolic flight. – AFP
Space tourism firm Virgin Galactic announced Thursday that a 32-year-old researcher, Kellie gerardi, very popular on the social network TikTok, would be sent to space to conduct experiments for a few minutes in zero gravity.
A way for Virgin Galactic to assert its ambition to fly, in addition to wealthy customers who can afford a ticket to more than $ 200,000 for the pleasure of travel, scientists aiming to advance research – and knowing how to communicate on the subject.
The rise of the commercial space industry “completely changes the situation, it is a turning point for the possibility that researchers have to conduct experiments” in zero gravity, told AFP the happy elected, bio researcher -astronautics (study of the effect of space on the human body) at the International Institute of Aeronautical Sciences.
With more than 400,000 subscribers on the TikTok short video network and 130,000 on Instagram, Kellie Gerardi is also the author of a book seeking to popularize the idea of a space sector accessible to all, while she has a diploma in cinema and not in aerospace.
A few minutes in zero gravity
His first experiment, named Astroskin, will consist of sensors placed under his suit to collect biometric data. The device has already been tested on board the International Space Station (ISS), but never during takeoff and landing phases. The second will aim to study the behavior of liquids in space.
The Virgin Galactic ship is still in the test phase but the company, which has not given a date for this flight, promises the start of regular commercial operations in early 2022. It is not a classic rocket but of a carrier plane which takes off from a runway then drops at altitude the spacecraft hanging under it, which fires its engines until it reaches space. It then descends while hovering.
Just a few minutes in space, isn’t that too short? “It’s the dream,” says the researcher, who until now has only been able to board parabolic flights providing only a few seconds of microgravity. These flights are carried out in conventional planes which tilt in turn strongly towards the sky, then the ground.
And when the experiments are sent to the ISS, they stay there for several months, but then the researchers “can’t fly with it,” says Kellie Gerardi. “They can’t manipulate them, or fix them” if necessary. With the Virgin Galactic solution, which aims to achieve up to 400 flights per year, “we could validate data over and over again, without having to wait years for a new flight opportunity,” she says.