Merignac, France – A team of French doctors said they successfully operated on a man in near-zero-gravity conditions Wednesday on a flight looping in the air like a roller coaster to mimic weightlessness.
The five-man team and the patient landed safely at an airport in southwestern France after a three-hour flight, although doctors said the midair surgery to remove a cyst from the man’s arm took only about 10 minutes.
Chief surgeon Dominique Martin said the near-zero-gravity operation, the first on a human, was not technically difficult but was aimed at breaking a barrier in medical expertise.
The experiment is part of a broader effort to develop robots for future operations from a distance – in space or on Earth.
The surgery went “exactly as we had expected,” Martin told reporters near Merignac airport, outside Bordeaux. “All the data we collected allow us to think that operating on a human in the conditions of space would not present insurmountable problems.”
The medical team was strapped down to the walls of the Airbus 300 Zero-G plane as it looped up and down in a total of 22 roller coaster-like maneuvers, called parabolas.
Each dive, creating conditions close to weightlessness, lasted 22 seconds – and the doctors operated only during those intervals.
