those of youwho know me know how passionate I am about opening the space frontier So when I had the chance to give the worlds expert in gravity the experience of zero gravity it was incredible and I want to tell you that story Ah I first met him through the Archon X-prize for genomics It’s a competition we’re holding the second X-prize for the first team to sequence a hundred human genomes in ten days We actually call it the genome 100 a hundred individuals we’re g… were sequencing is a part of that craig Ventor chairs that event And I met Professor Hawking and he said that his dream was to travel into space And I said “I can’t take you there but I can I can take you into weightlessness and into zero G .” and he said on the spot “Absolutely yes .” Well the only way to experience zero G on earth is actually with parabolic flight weightless flight You take an airplane you fly over the top your weightless for twenty-five seconds you come back down you weigh twice as much You do it again and again and you can get eight to ten minutes of weightlessness how NASA has trained their astronauts for so long We set out to do this took us eleven years to become operational and we announced that we’re going to fly Stephen Hawking we had one government agency and one company Aircraft opera said “You’re crazy don’t do that you’re gonna kill the guy !” and ah he wanted to go we worked hard to get all of the permissions and six months later we set down at the kennedy Space Center We had a press conference we announced our intent to do one zero G parabola get him get him twenty-five seconds of zero G and if it went really well we might do three parabolas well we asked him why he wanted to go up and do this and want he said for me was very moving he said “Life on earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster I think the human race doesn’t have a future if it doesn’t go into space I therefore want to encourage public interest in space .” We took him out to the kennedy Space Center Up inside the NASA vehicle and into the back of the ah zero G airplane We had about twenty people who made donations who raised a hundred and fifty thousand in donations for children charities who flew with us a few TEDsters here We set up a whole ER we had four emergency room doctors and two nurses on board the airplane who were monitoring the ah his PO2 of his blood his heart rate his blood pressure We had everything all set in case of an emergency god knows you don’t want to hurt this world’s renowned expert We took off from the shuttle landing facility where they take off where the shuttle takes off and lands and my partner byron Lichtenburg and I carefully suspended him into zero G once he was there let him go to let him experience what weightlessness is truly like And after that first parabola you know the doc said “Everything’s great .” He was smiling and we said “Go .” So we did a a second parabola and a third Now we actually floated and apple in homage to Sir Isaac newton because Professor hawking holds the same chair at Cambridge that Isaac Newton did and we did a fourth and a fifth and a sixth and a seventh and an eighth and this man does not look like a sixty-five year old wheelchair bound man he was so happy We are living on a precious jewel and it’s during our lifetime that we are moving off this planet Please join us in this epic adventure
