MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative’s 2024 microgravity flight features 37 parabolas and projects focused on health in space, walking in zero gravity, and missions to the moon. 

On May 14 this spring, the MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) hosted its sixth annual reduced gravity flight, offering researchers from across MIT and other institutions the special opportunity to test multiple projects in microgravity environments. The research on board investigated topics from potential medical device design, insulin pumps, and disinfectants in microgravity—helping promote accessibility and safety of spaceflight—to wireless sensor nodes for lunar exploration and zero gravity-friendly board games. 

Due to circumstantial issues in connection with the ZERO-G Research Program, through which the SEI charters its flights each year, the 2023 flight was rescheduled and combined with the regular 2024 flight. The class that accompanies the flight, Prototyping Our Space Future (MAS.838 / 16.88), was taught during the fall 2023 semester by SEI director Cody Paige; Media Lab Professor Joseph Paradiso; and MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics Professor Jeffrey Hoffman. This was Hoffman’s second year co-teaching the class, and Paige’s first as director of the SEI.  

“Having flown once before as a student, and now for the first time as director of SEI,” said Paige, “it was a merging of my two positions since the flight actually combined projects from 2022, including my own student project, and from the 2023 class when I was an instructor. It was so cool to see the student projects evolve from concept to flight-ready, and to be part of that story. I am incredibly proud of the work the students did to get here and am so excited to see where their projects will go in the future.”

A total of 15 projects and 25 flyers launched into the sky from Pease Airport (Portsmouth, New Hampshire) aboard this recent flight. But this year, the flight featured an additional seventeen parabolas—beyond the normal twenty—as the pilots completed additional training. “Meaning everyone got a chance to put down the science for a moment and truly embrace the extraordinary feeling of being weightless,” added Paige. 

Four of the projects had flown previously, and nineteen of the flyers were first-timers. Two of these veteran projects that flew on the 2022 flight, and that collected more data or tested new iterations in 2024, include Capturing the Moon and SpaceShoe. The main goal of the SpaceShoe project, led by Media Lab researcher Severin Meyer, is to create a shoe that’s fully controlled by the user's gait, enabling effortless walking in zero gravity. To achieve this, the shoe is equipped with a sensor network that measures the dynamics of the human foot, monitoring the pressure profile inside the shoe and gathering data on foot movements. The 2022 iteration of this project flew under the title Space Grip Shoe.   

The Capturing the Moon project, led by Paige, has traveled to Svalbard and the Canary Islands to be tested in those unique environments; utilizing a Microsoft Azure Kinect camera, the intention of this work is to create high-resolution, 3D maps of the lunar surface to enable scientists to perform “field work” on the moon—without need to travel there, and to train future lunar geologists and astronauts. Capturing the Moon will be flying on an upcoming lunar mission later this year; the AstroAnt project, which also flew this year and has flown on previous microgravity flights, will join the impending moon mission as well. 

AstroAnt, led by Media Lab researcher Fangzheng Liu, presents a miniature robotic swarm designed to perform inspections and diagnostic tasks on the external surfaces of spacecraft, rovers, and landers. In the next few months, the AstroAnt robot system will be working on the surface of the Lunar Outpost MAPP-1 rover, taking contactless temperature measurements of the top of the rover, where the thermal system radiator lies. This AstroAnt research is funded in part by Media Lab member company Castrol.

For the full list of projects and other related information, refer to this 2024 flight recap post on the MIT Media Lab website.