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British physicist Stephen Hawking took a flight on Thursday that gave the renowned scientist, who is confined to a wheelchair, a taste of the weightlessness of space.

Hawking, 65, and an entourage of caretakers and other thrill-seekers took off from the space shuttle’s runway at Kennedy Space Center in a specially modified jet that dives through the sky to give passengers an experience of zero gravity.

They returned to the space center in Florida about two hours later after doing eight of the dives, giving him four minutes of weightlessness.

“It was amazing,” Hawking said afterwards.

“Space here I come,” he said, referring to his hope that the experience will prepare him for a real sub-orbital space flight in the future.

Hawking acknowledged before the flight that experiencing weightlessness, even for a few seconds, would be sweet relief from the bondage of a daily life immobilised by a debilitating and irreversible neuromuscular disorder.

Future in space

“I have been wheelchair-bound for almost four decades and the chance to float free in zero g will be wonderful,” Hawking told a pre-flight news conference.

The acclaimed cosmologist and best-selling author of A Brief History of Time, who has posited theories to help explain black holes and other celestial phenomena, lost his ability for natural speech after a tracheotomy that followed a bout of pneumonia in 1985. He speaks with the aid of a computer-controlled voice synthesiser.

Hawking said in an interview on Wednesday that he feared that the human race did not have a future if it didn’t go into space. “I therefore want to encourage public interest in space. A zero-gravity flight is the first step towards space travel,” he said.

Suborbital flight

“Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers,” Hawking added at the news conference.

In a reference to his affliction, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, Hawking noted that his flight also would serve as a demonstration that “everybody can participate in this type of experience”.

During these flights, participants experience at least one free-fall, lasting about 25 seconds, where they float up from the floor. The manoeuvre is accomplished as the plane flies towards the ground following a steep climb.

The ride, which normally costs $3500, was courtesy of Florida-based Zero Gravity Corp., which operates a commercial zero-gravity service similar to what NASA uses to train astronauts.

Hawking hopes the experience will lead to a suborbital spaceflight aboard a new passenger service being developed by Virgin Atlantic Airway’s offshoot, Virgin Galactic. Commercial suborbital spaceflights are expected to begin in 2009.