NASA Nearly Crashed the Vomit Comet on a Reckless Trip to Greenland

NASA's infamous “Vomit Comet” zero gravity airplane briefly served as a delivery plane for the Navy and a private company owned by an ex astronaut, which some of the plane’s crew members who filed formal complaints felt was a misuse of the craft, according to documents obtained by Motherboard. The unorthodox use of the C-9 aircraft was driven, according to the complaints, by a desire at the high levels of the agency to prove the Vomit Comet was of practical use. Apparently, it didn't work—the C-9 aircraft program was defunded and shut down in 2014. Since 1959, NASA has used a variety of aircraft to simulate the weightlessness of space in order to train astronauts and perform basic experiments in zero gravity. From 2005 to 2014, the C-9, built in 1970, became one of NASA’s primary Vomet Comets.  According to documents uncovered by Motherboard using the Freedom of Information Act (embedded at the bottom of this article) show that the Vomit Comet was used on at least two occasions for purposes other than simulating space flight, while still labeling the missions "crew training." In the first instance, NASA officials pressured the crew to transport a giant wooden engine from Houston to Costa Rica as a favor to a former astronaut, according to two of the crew members. Although the mission was successful, NASA seemed to deliberately avoid publicizing the flight. On another occasion that year, the crew was asked to deliver Navy cargo to Greenland even though members of the crew said the trip was unsafe, resulting in a “near fatal crash,” according to documents from a NASA Inspector General investigation. Despite conducting an investigation, the agency says it never reviewed a video that was taken of the incident, and never contacted one of the crew members who was deemed the "principal witness." Both of these incidents were dismissed by NASA’s Inspector General and were never made public. At one time, NASA’s Vomit Comets made flights four days a week. But in recent years, due to a deemphasis on crewed missions at the perennially underfunded space agency, the Vomit Comet had begun to sit idle. In 2012, the aircraft was barely being used. In order to justify that the rarely-used C-9 still had a purpose in NASA’s fleet, the agency asked it to deliver Navy cargo to Thule, Greenland on March 7, 2012. According to one crew member, NASA was looking for a “business case” for flying the airplane. The plane, manufactured in 1970, wasn’t equipped for an Arctic mission and nearly crashed when it took off from Greenland after delivering the cargo, according to written statements from two members of the crew.