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High School Students Send Lego Man 24 Kilometers High
First time accepted submitter AbilityLiving writes "Two high schoolers have launched a Lego Man to 80,000 feet — three times the height of a jet — in a homebrew project that involved a few Ebay-purchased cameras, a giant helium balloon and a star-ship full of ingenuity."
I'd be more impressed if someone found a way to NOT get into space with a helium filled weather balloon.
Maintaining a constant altitude, and thus preventing the balloon bursting, would be very cool.
Good for these kids. I don't agree that this should be big news, as this is becoming a fairly common project for advanced high school students. I mentored a team of high school students in the Kansas City area that sent up balloons last fall. They designed and built the payload, fitting all the instrumentation and cameras. One made it to 97,000 ft. The other managed to fly all the way to Illinois. In both cases the payload was recovered undamaged. They got some *awesome* video and pictures.
When I saw the title of this story ("High School Students Send Lego Man 24 Kilometers High"), my first interpretation was that some students had built a 24-kilometer-high man out of legos, and then sent it somewhere... I was wondering how many legos it took, and how much the postage was!
I wonder how tall you could build a tower of legos before the weight crushed the legos making up the bottom level?
My calculations might be wrong here, but I've always wondered... If a high-school can launch a helium balloon to a height of 24km, and also launch a homemade rocket that can rise as hight as 30km, couldn't some high-school class launch a rocket from the top point of a helium balloon to reach geosynchronous orbit? Wouldn't that be a feat more worthy of commenting? What would be the problems with such a lauch?