Ground-Based

Drop Towers -- Before travelling to the International Space Station, many microgravity experiments are tested on Earth in one of NASA's drop towers.

• 2.2 Second Drop Tower
• 5.18 Second Drop Tower
• WING and DIME -- Drop everything! NASA's competitions "What If No Gravity," or WING, and "Dropping In a Microgravity Environment," or DIME, challenge students to design and build an experiment that could be conducted in a NASA research drop tower.

Reduced-Gravity Aircraft

Special reduced-gravity aircraft fly roller-coaster-like climbs and dips to produce periods of microgravity and hypergravity, ranging from zero g to 2 g's.

• NASA Flight Opportunities Program -- The program develops and provides opportunities for space technologies to be demonstrated and validated in relevant environments. The platforms offer lunar (0.16-g), Mars (0.38-g) or near-zero gravity, or access to suborbital space to fly experiments.
• Microgravity University -- The Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program provides a unique academic experience for undergraduate students to successfully propose, design, fabricate, fly and evaluate a reduced-gravity experiment of their choice.
• Reduced-Gravity Flight Opportunity -- NASA's Teaching From Space Office and the Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program provide an opportunity for K-12 students and educators in the U.S. to collaborate on a reduced-gravity experiment. Selected educator teams receive online professional development training on microgravity and the opportunity to test their students' experiments aboard a reduced-gravity flight.

Sounding Rockets

The Sounding Rockets Program Office provides suborbital launch vehicles to support NASA and other government agencies.

• NASA's Wallops Flight Facility -- NASA launches 10 different sounding rocket vehicles that can carry payloads that weigh up to 1,500 pounds.
• Wallops Education Flight Projects -- Education programs developed at Wallops are designed to give students and educators hands-on flight experiences through the use of NASA sounding rockets and scientific balloons.

Orbiting Spacecraft

The International Space Station is equipped with a variety of laboratories and resources to perform science experiments and test technologies.

• The International Space Station National Lab
• International Space Station National Lab K-12 Education