Juggling and dancing to make space tourism more accessible

Adam Dipert is a nuclear physicist, professional circus performer and dancer who first stumbled upon microgravity movements after helping buy a parabolic flight for a friend's 40th birthday. Dipert was fascinated by how the human body moves during such flights, which quickly switch between microgravity, Earth gravity, and major gravity.

His film, “Dreaming of Space Juggling,” will be released on the Space Juggler website early November. Dipert is also planning a series of educational videos around the week of November 21, focusing on how a parabolic flight works and doing demonstrations with physical objects.

credit: Blue Origin Dance in particular, according to Dipert, is has been poorly studied in microgravity environments. "I would really like to see the space community understand that there is profound research going on in dance, especially the academic forms of dance, and there are people who already know how to express this stuff," said Dipert, whose stated goal would be to build a bridge between the dance of microgravity and mathematics as part of a larger educational fusion under STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics).

More practically, dance could be a way to get people to have deeper experiences on parabolic flights (or even suborbital flights of space tourism, as they become available) instead of floating, Dipert suggested. In fact, during its parabolic flights, people often became disoriented because their limbs pointed in different directions than usual; dance gives direction. "Dance will make all forms of space tourism more accessible to more people who would otherwise experience disorientation, due to lack of concentration," he said.