By Kari Lucin, staff writer

Southwest Middle School science teacher Ken Fiscus was almost an astronaut.

One of his first memories is watching a moon mission when he was about 4 years old, on a black-and-white television at his neighbor&8217;s house. Later he became fascinated by astronomy when a neighbor going to college left behind two telescopes.

Thirty-five years later &8212; after being a runner-up to go to space as a teacher astronaut &8212; Fiscus will get to experience the weightlessness of space, without ever leaving the earth&8217;s atmosphere, on Sept. 9.

Fiscus and 30 other teachers in the Midwest will head for the NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, where they will fly in the Zero-G Corp.&8217;s modified Boeing 727, designed to simulate the zero gravity environment of space.

The plane takes its passengers up and then proceeds to fly in large arcs. At the top of the arcs, the plane and the passengers in it are weightless &8212; an effect which can be simulated by tossing a water bottle, pointed out Fiscus. At the top of the arc, the water inside the bottle will be weightless too. It&8217;s the same feeling people get when they fly over a slope on a rollercoaster or drive over railroad tracks a little too fast.

&8220;You&8217;re basically being lobbed,&8221; Fiscus said.

A similar plane was used to film the weightless scenes in the movie &8220;Apollo 13.&8221; People used to get sick so often the old plane was called the &8220;Vomit Comet,&8221; but these days passengers are medicated with anti-nausea drugs and few get sick anymore.

Fiscus and the other teachers have designed experiments to try on their flight. One man will roll up into a little ball and allow the others to play catch with him &8212; a feat only possible in the absence of gravity. Fiscus will bring a CD player and a pendulum. They will be weightless 15 times, allowing for brief experiments.

The research he and the other teachers on the flight do will be recorded by multiple video cameras so that he can bring the experiments back for students to watch.

He and the other teachers will not have to pay for the ride, which normally costs $3,800. Corporate sponsor Northrop Grumman, one of NASA&8217;s contractors, is footing the bill. The teachers only need to pay their own airfare, and Fiscus used up a lot of frequent flier miles for the trip to Cleveland and back.

The teachers, all finalists for the teacher-in-space program who weren&8217;t chosen to go into space, became part of the Network of Educator Astronaut Teachers. NEAT has a workshop each year and sends its teachers home with materials like fuel cells, wind generators and solar panels, asking in return only that they spread the word of NASA&8217;s research and accomplishments.

For Fiscus, who watches an hour or two of NASA television every week, that isn&8217;t hard.

&8220;It isn&8217;t just Tang and Velcro; it isn&8217;t the space station,&8221; Fiscus said. &8220;It&8217;s medical imagery, just incredible things like battery technology and laptops, more efficient fluorescent lighting. Glenn is really big into wind energy research and fuel cell research, nuclear propulsion, all kinds of stuff.&8221;