Do you want to interest kids in space? Do you live far from where rockets are built, tested and/or launched? Do you live far from anything of aeronautical interest? Adn do you live in some nightmarish urban blight or bureaucratic craphole where you’re not allowed to build and launch your own rockets? Then try THIS idea on for size:
Father-Son Team Launch Balloon With HD Camera, iPhone Into Space
The team was headed by Luke Geissbuhler and his 7-year-old son Max, who found the camera about 30 miles from the launch site in upstate New York. At its peak, the balloon reached an altitude of about 100,000 feet and battled 100-m.p.h. winds before it burst, sending the camera and iPhone hurtling back to earth at rates of 150 m.p.h. A specially designed parachute attached to the capsule eventually slowed it to about 15 m.p.h.
This sure as hell put my crappy fossil display to shame.
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3 Responses to “Do-It-Yourself Space Program”
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I built a budget Skyhook as a kid; a standard rubber helium balloon inside of a cellophane dry-cleaning bag so that when the balloon popped at altitude, the helium would stay in the bag and it could still climb.
It carried a return postcard inside of a heat-sealed plastic food storage bag offering a $1.00 reward to whoever found it.
This worked better than my wildest dreams; it came down 480 miles from Jamestown, way up in Canada – surprising in that it headed due south on liftoff.
Couldn’t beat the whole project for economy; balloon, postage for the return card, and reward came up costing around $2.50 total.
Later attempts in the 1990’s using semi-inflated garbage bags work nowhere near as well: most just vanished – from around ten launched, only one card came back from only 40 miles away, even though the reward was raised to $5.00.
Pat
BTW, regarding your fossil collection; it took me over thirty years to find a trilobite around here, and even then it didn’t have a head on it, but just the rest of the body in back of it.
What really made this annoying is that a childhood friend of mine picked a complete one up off of the playground of the Catholic primary school I was attending – from around three feet away from me – when I was around eight years old.
Now, branchipods… you want to find branchipods, head to Jamestown, North Dakota, as its branchipod fossil central.
…more branchipods than you can shake a stick at, if that’s your idea of a good time.
It’s certainly not mine.
This story was all over the TV news yesterday; they keep describing the balloon as having flown into outer space, even though it’s not going to generate much lift in a vacuum.
They showed pictures of the balloon with its camera pod under it; did he get the okay from the FAA before launching it? The camera pod looked substantial enough to damage an aircraft if it ran into it on the way up or down.
The radiosondes the weather bureau sends up are very lightly built out of cardboard so that they won’t damage an aircraft if it hits one.