Teens Send Lego Man Up 80,000 Feet on Balloon
Two Canadian teens launched a Lego man almost 80,000 feet above sea level and caught it all on video! Matthew Ho and Asad Muhammed got the idea nearly two years ago and have been planning it ever since. The video clip the mad is pretty cool, but greatly shortened. Ho and Muhammed estimate that it took their balloon craft one hour and five minutes to climb 80,000 feet before it finally popped. The parachute controlled descent took a little more than 30 minutes.
The friends spent four and a half months working on the project, mostly on Saturdays. In a video interview with the Star, they said the hardest part was making the parachute, which they decided to hand-sew, even though neither of them had any sewing experience. They also constructed a lightweight Styrofoam box to carry three point-and-shoot cameras, a wide-angle video camera and a cellphone with a downloadable GPS app. They purchased a professional weather balloon for $85 online. The helium that would lift it up came from a party supply store. For launch, they put two mitten warmers in the Styrofoam box to keep the cameras working at that altitude. The whole project cost them about $400.
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