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DIY Space Photography
Four Spanish teenagers sent a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere. The boys built the electronic sensor components from scratch. Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta Gasull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel Casamort attached a £56 camera to a heavy duty £43 latex balloon, and sent their science project 20-miles above the Earth. Team leader Gerard Marull, 18, said, "We were overwhelmed at our results, especially the photographs, to send our handmade craft to the edge of space is incredible."
The "edge of space" is around 62 miles, also where the X-15 set its altitude records. But this project only (ha) went to 20 miles. So you'd be very very safe from random debris in an X-15!
"SABLE-3 was launched on Saturday, August 11th, 2007, at 9:31 AM with a payload, consisting of a Nikon Coolpix P2 digital camera set to take 1 image every minute and a Byonics MicroTrak 300 APRS Tracker, that the Kaysam 1200 gram balloon carried to over 117,597 feet. The last payload camera photo from the ground was just before it was launched, at 9:31 AM, and the last photo before the balloon burst was the photo above, at 12:01 PM, exactly 2.5 hours or 150 images later." link - more info here
Here's images from a similar flight conducted by Oklahoma State university students in July last year:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arena5/sets/72157606119049987/
You can think of the hundreds of weather balloons launched every day all over the world just to make forecasts better.
You don't need any clearence, provided the balloon and the payload is small enough. You can look up the limits yourself. If you're feeling nice, you can optionally file a NOTAM about balloon activity, but it is not required.
Note that the hard part is payload recovery.
I think the air traffic lanes and similar cruising altitudes decrease your "big" approximation a bit. Question, how long was the balloon between 25,000 and 30,000 feet.
Nuts and Volts magazine is writing about this for several years now. CO, USA.
Latest article: http://www.nutsvolts.com/index.php?/magazine/issue/2009/03
Author: http://www.nutsvolts.com/index.php?/magazine/contributor/l_paul_verhage
Nothing new here. Move on.
Actually nearly all GPS units will not give readings above 60,000 feet. This is to prevent foreign countries from using our own system to lob missiles at us. KySat http://www.kysat.com/home.aspx did a similar balloon mission last summer. Some chips work, others dont. In our case it was a 50% failure rate.
in the U.S. sending payloads into "near space" on a fairly regular basis. It's much more common than most people would suspect. I've seen a rough estimate of ~1500 people in the U.S. who are involved with near space experimentation. It's very cool stuff and one of the few minimally regulated amateur sciences still available to those so inclined in the U.S.
An excellent primer is the Near Space Book: http://www.parallax.com/tabid/567/Default.aspx
Here are several links to active near space groups:
Treasure Valley Near Space Program: http://www.tvnsp.org/
Arizona Near Space Research: http://www.ansr.org/node/7
JP Aerospace: http://www.jpaerospace.com/
Most of these groups often need help with tracking and launching and at very least will share what they have learned with those interested.
They have a site with info on the project http://teslabs.com/meteotek08/ where they explain how they did it and they difficulties they faced, it's in Catalan so you might want to use Google to translate it.
Apparently they had to postpone the launch several times due to the weather conditions. They finally launched one day before their permission from AENA -the Spanish civil aviation authority- expired.