Weightlessness NASA's This report is a review of the article in Scientific America, "A Taste of Weightlessness." As a young child I always wanted to do what the author had the opportunity to do - be an astronaut. Once in space, my visions associated with astronauts has them always smiling as they are sending back pictures of themselves to the world. They are always brushing their teeth in these shots while all the while hovering in mid -- well, is it right to say 'air.'

After a space walk, a successful return trip to earth and a landing somewhere in a Utah salt plain, my vision of a true astronaut has him sitting in the back of a convertible waving to his adoring fans during a nationally televised tickertape parade. Of course, the idea of being an astronaut also entails a congratulations visit to the White House to meet the President of the United States.

This article may not have met my childhood expectations of flying between planets, but it did provide a well written account of the author's firsthand experience with weightlessness. This report has been laid out into an introductory paragraph, a how it matters to me section and various insights into weightlessness. I finish the report with some personal feedback and opinions about the topic of weightlessness and close with a conclusion and follow up thoughts I got from reading the article.

"Flush and excited in Houston's late-summer heat, some of the visiting collegians are dreaming of becoming astronauts, and others are bent on publishing their first scientific paper. Almost all of them are quietly hoping they won't throw up. In a few days, they will get to do something most people do only in their dreams: float in midair, unchained from gravity's anchor."(Zorpette, 1999)
Weightlessness can be more accurately called microgravity. From a scientific perspective, astronauts are not weightless in space, what is actually happening is that Earth's gravitational pull is literally holding a space vehicle and all of its content in an orbit. The real effect of weightlessness is that the weightless person is technically falling as opposed to floating. The weightless individual is considered in a state of free-fall. For someone in this state to move from room A to room B, the person would literally have to pull or grab Isaac Newton stated 'For every…