Father and son film outer space, do-it-yourself style

[Whoa_Nelly]

http://green.yahoo.com/blog/guest_bloggers/73/father-and-son-film-outer-space-do-it-yourself-style.html

Like many youngsters, and those young at heart, seven-year-old Max Geissbuhler and his dad dreamed of visiting space -- and armed with just a weather balloon, a video camera, and an iPhone, in a way they did just that.

The father-and-son team from Brooklyn managed to send their homemade spacecraft up nearly 19 miles, high into the stratosphere, bringing back perhaps the most impressive amateur space footage ever. The amazing footage starts at 2:35 minutes in the video below.

(video at link)

The duo housed the video camera, iPhone, and GPS equipment in a specially designed insulated casing, along with some hand-warmers and a note from Max requesting its safe return from whomever may find it after making it back to solid ground. All told, father and son spent eight months preparing for their homemade journey into space, in hopes of filming "the blackness beyond our earth."

<snip>
After a little over an hour, the craft reached the stratosphere, 100 thousand feet overhead, and captured some incredible footage of space before the balloon popped and fell back towards earth. They found their spacecraft 25 miles away from where they had let it go -- stuck up in a tree.

[ixion]

1. An awesome story...

:woohoo:

[cherokeeprogressive]

2. What a COOL Dad! n/t

[BlueJazz]

3. Super, Super Cool!

[gristy]

4. Very inspiring. Just amazing.

:thumbsup::thumbsup:

[progressoid]

5. Wow

My brother would have loved this.

k/r

[Leftist Agitator]

6. "Lawnchair" Larry Walters would be proud of these two...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Walters

This is one of the coolest projects I've ever seen.

Enthusiastic K&R!

[Fumesucker]

7. There's a similar project in Italy..

http://spacetweepsociety.org/blogs/amoroso/stratospera-italian-amateur-stratospheric-balloon-project

[caraher]

8. Lots of colleges have this

including mine. A company called Stratostar sells kits for doing tracking and telemetry. And a lot of amateurs just fly ham radios and cameras

[deutsey]

9. Thanks for posting.

After all that crap about the nutcase tormenting a dying girl, this is a very welcome inspiring story.