 On our first day at Ellington Airfield, we participated in an orientation describing how the program would proceed and were briefed on important safety information as we would be working in a busy hangar around NASA's reduced gravity planes and ground crew. We'll welcome my name is Doug O'Bourg, I'm the co-director of NASA's Reduced Gravity Education Superflight, our educational flight program. What I really need to pay attention to are anything safety related. The first order of business after orientation was to unpack the supplies we had shipped from North Carolina and begin the assembly of our experiments. During a break, we examined the plane we would be using, a modified McDonnell Douglas DC-9. It flies a series of parabolas over the Gulf of Mexico during which time varying degrees of weightlessness are achieved. In the next phase, we constructed the box that was to house our experiments. Then we mounted the three experiments and conducted ground tests. One afternoon, we left Ellington and drove to the Sunny Carter training facility operated by NASA. This building houses the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, one of the largest indoor pools in the world. Inside the pool are mock-ups of key parts of the space shuttle and the International Space Station. The Neutral Buoyancy Lab is used to train astronauts in preparation for spacewalks and working in microgravity. The Sunny Carter facility also contains a hypobaric chamber which was used to test our flight readiness. Within the chamber, our behaviors were observed as pressure was reduced to that of an altitude of 25,000 feet. Finally, the experiments were loaded and ready. The plane was on the tarmac and we were lined up ready to board. Jelf Milbourne and I flew the first mission. After some tweaking, the experiments were flown again by Bob Gottwals and Rachel Brady, our NASA mentor. On each flight, the first two parabolas simulated Mars gravity, the next two parabolas that of the moon. And during the final 26, we experienced microgravity. While we tended our primary experiments for the first 30 parabolas, during the last two, we were encouraged to conduct secondary experiments.