The first parabolic flight campaign for students

In the last week of November 1994, a different type of parabolic flight campaign took place: For the first time, students were given the unique opportunity of experiencing weightlessness. The campaign was part of the second European Week for Scientific Culture and the main goal was to motivate and educate the students rather than to obtain pure scientific and technological results as is normally the case in 'professional' campaigns. Twenty student experiments were chosen in a Europe-wide competition and the winning student teams were invited to carry out the experiments during a series of parabolic flights. The experiments covered a wide variety of disciplines ranging from general and fluid physics to material processing, crystal growth, and technology research. The campaign was a great success, all experiments worked well and the students proved to be a serious and motivated workforce which performed well in the rather unsettling microgravity environment. By learning from each other's experiments and through the unique personal experience of weightlessness, the students have become ambassadors for microgravity research. Most importantly, they have shown that we can have confidence in the next generation to make good use of microgravity research opportunities, including the International Space Station, in the future.