The Florida Space Research Institute has chartered the flights under a partnership with ZERO-G Corp. to support research operations aboard their G-Force One aircraft.

The missions will include researchers from universities, industry, NASA and a team from Italy. Their experiments will focus on technologies for astronaut crew health, aerogel production, spacecraft cooling, and other projects. Twelve science and math teachers are also scheduled to fly with educational experiments designed for classroom instruction.

"In addition to flying the experiments, one of our objectives is to demonstrate our capability to process the research projects at the spaceport before and after their flights," said Sam Durrance, FSRI's executive director and a former astronaut and veteran of two shuttle science missions. "This capability is an important addition to the tourism, education, and film/television projects we have already supported at the spaceport."

While NASA will provide the use of the runway, the missions also will use state-provided resources such as the Reusable Launch Vehicle Hangar, Space Life Sciences Lab and the Center for Space Education to support the preparation of experiments and pre-flight training.

FSRI was established by Florida's governor and legislature in 1999 to promote collaboration among the state's academic institutions, industry, and federal agencies to support statewide aerospace-related technology development, research, education and training, research. FSRI will be dissolved Aug. 31 and its programs will be transferred to Space Florida, a new agency that will be responsible for statewide space industry development.

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Florida Space Research Institute
Space Technology News - Applications and Research