Homemade Spacecraft
Watch this and see if you don’t agree that Luke Geissbühler deserves to win some sort of Coolest Dad of the Year award:
This is footage that Geissbühler edited together after he and his young son Max attached a Go Pro Hero HD video camera to a helium-filled weather balloon “that rose into the upper stratosphere and recorded the blackness of space.”
After months of research, planning, and flight tests, the intrepid duo and their friends traveled from Park Slope, Brooklyn to a remote area of Newburgh in Orange County, NY with their camera and GPS system carefully wrapped in a homemade styrofoam capsule and fitted with a parachute. The balloon that carried this hand-crafted vessel skyward was rated to burst at 19 feet in diameter, and reached a height of nearly 20 miles above the earth before that happened.
This was all done within FAA regulations. This is awesome. Not just in the colloquial sense of the word, but by its dictionary definition: amazing, awe inspiring, and provoking wonderment.
September 30th, 2010 at 8:25 pm
That was truly awesome, I was worried for a moment that the balloon would cover the camera the whole descent, glad it didn’t (even though the descent was pretty vertiginous) Now all he needs to do is send himself into space! That couldn’t possibly go wrong…
October 1st, 2010 at 2:22 am
Supercool!
October 1st, 2010 at 4:24 am
Yes, some kind of award is called for.
One thing that I love about this, besides the incredible success, is that it was so *doable*. HD cameras aren’t cheap, but average people were able to send something into space, record that, and then retrieve it.
Epic, and indeed inspiring!
October 1st, 2010 at 5:37 am
Made my morning. Thanks.
October 1st, 2010 at 1:35 pm
I don’t mean to plug my own contest, but if you enjoyed this, I helped run a contest (just concluded) that was solely teams putting balloons like this into space. Ordinary people just like you and me, putting an object into space, quite possibly the most rewarding thing of my life. http://www.hackerspacesinspace.com
October 2nd, 2010 at 3:21 am
adorable amazing beautiful. want one.
October 3rd, 2010 at 9:53 pm
Pity those Drum and Bass aliens decided they needed to pop the balloon before it got even higher.