Marcel Winatschek

The Case for Abolishing Gravity, Starring Kate Upton

Sports Illustrated put Kate Upton on a parabolic flight—the kind NASA uses for astronaut weightlessness training—and pointed a camera at her while gravity temporarily stopped doing what gravity does. Whether this was the greatest editorial decision in sports journalism history or a deranged experiment in applied physics, I genuinely can’t say. Possibly both.

The specific interest here is Upton’s chest, which has been a topic of considerable public discussion for several years. What the Sports Illustrated team discovered, by the scientific method of filming it in zero-g, is that freed from the standard terrestrial arrangement, everything moves differently. Her hair fans out, her body lifts slightly, and those breasts—the ones that launched approximately a thousand covers—drift and bounce in a way that no earthbound photography could replicate. It’s genuinely something to behold.

She grins through the whole thing, which is what makes it charming rather than just obscene. There’s something almost sweet about the commitment to the premise: rent a plane, induce weightlessness for thirty seconds at a stretch, document what happens. Science has never been so educational.