What it's really like to fly in 'zero gravity' like Ok Go did in their new music video
The pop band, known for its ambitious music videos, filmed its latest single "Upside Down and Inside Out" in a Russian reduced-gravity plane, which flies in a way that produces weightlessness, Rolling Stone reported. To prepare for the feat, the band trained for three weeks at ROSCOSMOS, Russia's equivalent of NASA.
"What you are about to see is real. We shot this in zero gravity, in an actual plane, in the sky. There are no wires or green screen," the video's opening reads.
What it's like to fly in 'reduced gravity'
Several years ago, I had the chance to fly in a reduced gravity plane myself, as part of NASA's Microgravity University, a program where teams of college students design experiments and fly them aboard a special airplane nicknamed the "vomit comet."
And it's not called that for nothing - the human body doesn't always take kindly to floating around, and many people (not me, thankfully) get violently sick. Luckily, they give you anti-nausea drugs, and an air sickness bag, just in case.
The plane flies in arcs called parabolas, and since you and the plane are falling at the same rate, you don't feel like you're experiencing gravity. NASA refers to these flights as "reduced" or "micro" gravity, because you experience a mix of partial Gs at the top and bottom of each parabola known as dirty air.
On my flight, we did about 25 parabolas, and each one gives you only about 20 to 30 seconds of weightlessness. But Ok Go's 3-minute video appears to be one continuous take, thanks to some clever editing.
We were technically doing the zero-G flights to test our experiment - a system for manipulating droplets of fluid in zero G using sound waves - but I managed to get in a bit of play time. Still, 30 seconds in zero-G goes by surprisingly fast. Before you know it, the pilot is throttling back the plane to pull out of the dive, and you get the delightful experience of pulling two "Gs."
In Ok Go's video, the band members seem to effortlessly tumble about the plane, doing flips, aerial push ups, and other forms of synchronized acrobatics.
Two flight attendants even appear to get in on the fun:
From there, things just get even more absurd:
You can watch the full video below: