“Frances, that’s not—” Barbara started.

Joan looked at Frances. “You’re right, I don’t. But if I go up into space, I will.”

“You’ll float?”

“Have they taught you yet in school how gravity works?”

“It pushes us down?”

“It pulls us. Everything that has mass has some amount of gravitational pull. So think about this—Actually, wait, come with me.”

Joan got up from the table and walked into her bedroom, looking for something heavy. She wanted a bowling ball but settled for a few rolls of quarters. She tore the comforter off her bed.

“What are you doing?” Barbara said. Frances was smiling.

“Okay, look.” Joan threw the rolls of quarters onto the mattress. “The quarters are heavy, right? They have mass.”

Frances nodded, but then Barbara did, too, and it stopped Joan for a second.

“Okay, look at the mattress over here,” Joan said, pointing to an empty space. “It’s flat. It’s a flat plane, right?”

“Right,” Barbara said.

“But look over here, by the quarters,” Joan said. She pointed to the indentation the quarters made in the mattress, the way the rolls sank into the mattress around them in a circle. “If the mattress is the fabric of space, do you see how the mass of the quarters bends the space around it? It’s creating gravity. Hold on.”

She searched in her freezer and found a bag of peas. She opened it up and took one out and returned to Barbara and Frances.

“So if I put a pea where it’s flat, what happens?”

“Nothing,” Frances said.

“Right, it stays put. Nothing near it has enough mass to pull it anywhere. But now,” Joan said, placing a pea just outside the quarters. “What happens when I put one within the gravitational force of the quarters?”

The pea rolled toward the quarters.

“It rolls.”

“It’s being pulled,” Joan said. “Right.”

“So the quarters are the Earth, and we are the pea,” Barbara said.

Joan nodded. “Yep, the pea is all of us and all the trees and all the dust and all the dirt and every animal and all the—”

“We get it.”

“Okay, sure,” Joan said. “So right now, we’re the pea right here. If I get chosen to go up into space one day, I’ll be the pea here.”

She put it back on the flat plane of the mattress. “Nothing will be pulling me down, at least not at the rate that Earth can. So if I’m not being pulled toward the Earth, what’s going to happen?”

“You’re gonna float,” Frances said.

“I’m gonna float.”

—

They called it the Vomit Comet—a Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker. It was designed as a refueler, but at NASA, it had a much different job. It was a cargo plane—with no seats, only padding—used to simulate weightlessness.

With the ASCANs as passengers, the pilot would fly a series of parabolas that would lift the ASCANs into the air with extra gravitational forces, then lower them back down, allowing them to enter free fall. In between these moments of intense lift and fall, there were pockets of time—less than a minute—in which the ASCANs would float in midair.