Can Pet Parrots Fly In Space?

“Actually, I’m a macaw.”

Did you get up this morning wondering if parrots could fly in space? Well, then I am here to help you out with the answer to this question and some of the ways we are different from parrots. So worry no more. 

If you’ve ever been in a Spacecraft or Space Stations orbiting Earth, you know that it’s weightless inside. But, you probably discovered that you can fly there by gliding straight across from one wall to the opposite one.

Now, in the future, we’ll be able to do more than glide, we’ll be able to fly like a bird and a whole lot more. A simple scan of our brain on a machine will empower us to take any form we want …even the body of a parrot.

So, in that case, instead of calling a human a bird brain or a featherbrain, you might call a bird scanned with a human consciousness a hairy brain…no… that sounds dumb. That sounds like something someone with feathers for brains would say.

But enough of this nonsense let’s get back to a serious matter—parrots in space.

What would happen if a bird was released into a wide-open space on a starship or space station? Well on earth with our gravity, a parrot would flap its wings fast to take off and keeps flapping away to stay in the air. It would also flap a lot to slow down so it can land.

Not parrots, but birds like hawks, are good at gliding. Once they are airborne, they can soar in the sky for long periods of time without any flapping.

In space, a parrot would also flap away to build up speed, and flap a lot to decelerate and land. Otherwise, it would run into a wall…like humans do in space when they fly from one wall to another. The difference between space and earth is that in the middle of the flight, the parrot would glide. It won’t need to flap at that point because there is no gravity to pull it down.

Wings are the big difference between a parrot in space and a human in space. In a space station full of air, birds can still use their wings and their tail to accelerate and decelerate mid-flight just like on earth.

But humans can’t. All we can do is kick off a wall and fly in a straight-line until we smack into the opposite wall.

A parrot in space would have to make some adjustments to compensate for no or low gravity but once they learned to use their wings and tail correctly they could fly with control.

The real question is, do parrots have bird brains, in other words, are they smart enough to adapt to zero-gravity? Parrots are cleverer than you might think. There’s a good chance that with a little practice a pet parrot would figure it out.

Why am I talking about parrots? Well, Sir Rupert the parrot is very important to my Pets in Space 2 story, Time Trap (read an excerpt here) AND he’s very much part of my upcoming Project Enterprise 7 book! Plus, parrots are just cool. 

Stick around for more information about Project Enterprise 7! I promise it is coming!

Perilously yours,

Pauline