Professor Stephen Hawking, a fellow at Gonville and Caius College, yesterday swapped the Cambridge spring air for a weightless environment. Dressed in a blue space sui,t and with an Addenbrooke’s team of doctors and helpers on hand, the world renowned physicist was propelled through the air so fast that he was able to enjoy zero gravity.

“As someone who has studied gravity and black holes all of my life, I am excited to experience firsthand weightlessness and a zero-gravity environment”, Hawking had said in a statement.

Hawking’s flight was operated by Zero Gravity Corporation, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based company which specialises in space tourism and entertainment. He took off from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral on April 26.

He soared straight up to 32,000 feet in a specially modified Boeing 727 jet, “G-Force One”, before plunging 8,000 feet through a chunk of designated airspace 10 miles wide and 100 miles long. On the way up, Hawking will have felt 1.8 times the normal gravitational pull of the earth for 25 seconds before experiencing weightlessness, the opposite effect, during the descent. 15 such arcs were completed.

An expert in respiratory illnesses and a specialist in intensive care, both from Cambridge’s Addenbrooke’s Hospital, were flown round the world on Wednesday to join Professor Hawking on the flight.

Aircraft similar to “G-Force One” were christened “vomit comets” by the NASA astronauts who trained in them. It is believed that Professor Hawking suffered no ill effects on yesterday’s flight.

Zero Gravity have underwritten the normal $3,750 cost of Hawking’s ticket, with the two remaining seats being auctioned off to charity.

The flight may well have provided valuable training for Professor Hawking, who last year publicly expressed his wish to go into space. It is understood that Richard Branson , whose Virgin Galactic company is in the process of building a suborbital spaceship, has decided to personally finance Hawking’s trip into space, a venture which would normally cost $200,000.

When Hawking makes the trip, he will be following his own advice. Last year he told a news conference in Hong Kong that “It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species.”

Hawking is most famous for his best-selling publication, A Brief History of Time, and more recently for The Universe in a Nutshell, which enjoyed similar popularity. Since 1980 he has held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a role previously filled by Isaac Newton and Paul Dirac. He was born in Oxford on the 300th anniversary of Galileo’s death.

Elliot Ross