WASHINGTON — A startup has acquired an aircraft to offer commercial parabolic flight services even as NASA seeks to acquire its own aircraft for reduced-gravity research.
Mu-g Technologies recently took delivery of a Dassault Falcon 50 business jet that the company plans to use for parabolic flights, providing brief periods of microgravity for research and technology demonstrations.
Such flights, along with those carrying tourists, had been conducted for years by Zero-G Corp. on its Boeing 727. However, that plane has not flown commercially since last year, and the company has provided no updates on when it will resume flights. “Our flight schedule for the rest of 2025 is in the works!” the company’s website recently stated.
“There was a need for modern, in-production aircraft to sustain the industry,” said Robert Ward, founder and chief executive of Mu-g, in an interview. He has been involved in parabolic flight projects since serving as a test subject on a NASA flight in 1995 and later worked at Zero-G. “That was, in some ways, the genesis of Mu-g.”
The company decided to start with a smaller aircraft. “We saw when Zero-G stopped flying last year that capability gap got blown wide open, and so we realized that there are payloads that need to fly, experiments that need to be done, things that we need to do,” he said.
That led the company to the Falcon 50, which he described as the “ideal platform” for flying one or two payloads at a time. The company recently acquired one of those planes, which is undergoing scheduled maintenance ahead of flight tests. The company also will modify the plane’s interior to support research.
“We know it’s an ideal platform, but now we have to verify it and validate it by going out and actually flying parabolas on it,” he said. The company expects to get microgravity parabolas of 20 to 25 seconds, assisted by a digital flight control system in the plane to ensure it flies the proper trajectory.
He believes there will be strong interest among researchers in flying on the plane. “The demand signal is very strong, and part of that is because there were a lot of payloads that were working on, you know, getting manifested to fly with Zero-G,” he said, including those funded by NASA’s Flight Opportunities program, which supports payloads seeking parabolic or suborbital flights.
Ward said he hoped to be flying commercially within six months, noting that the schedule depends in part on getting certification from the Federal Aviation Administration.
He did not disclose how much Mu-g is spending to begin operations with the Falcon 50, but said it has been self-funded so far. He said the company is starting to reach out to potential investors and strategic partners, particularly as it has future plans to acquire an Airbus A321 airliner.
As Mu-g prepares to fly its aircraft, NASA is working to acquire its own for reduced-gravity testing. The agency announced June 1 that it awarded an $8.4 million contract to Denmar Technical Services to perform modifications and maintenance on a Boeing 737-700 aircraft that the agency will then own and operate.
NASA said it will use the plane “to validate astronaut lunar suits and associated crew systems required to support Artemis mission objectives.”
Ward said he did not see NASA’s plans as competition for his company. “The work that they’re going to be doing on that aircraft is going to be work that NASA needs to get done,” he said, adding that having multiple aircraft of different types able to perform parabolic flights provides redundancy if one of the planes is out of service for an extended period.
“If they’re flying parabolas, and we’re flying parabolas, we’re all winning,” he said.
