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."

Comments

It's been done

[Squiddie]

to death. Then again, I am more interested in FPV flights and UAVs than balloons.

Re:It's been done

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It's been done

[NeutronCowboy]

And it is cool every single time. Seriously, if nothing else, it shows that reaching space is something that anyone can do. Instead of complaining that it's being done to death, why not improve on it? I fully plan on being part of the me-too crowd of space-photography. Once that's done, maybe I can do something to improve on it. Who knows? Someone will probably beat me to the "cooler" part. But that's what makes it fun.

Re:It's been done

[fotbr]

Sending a balloon to 80,000 ft is not "into space". So far, no one has actually managed to get a weather balloon to exit the atmosphere. Actually doing so would be much, much more impressive than "kids stuck camera, gps logger, and random object in a styrofoam box and brought back pretty pictures".

Re:It's been done

[dgatwood]

Maintaining a constant altitude, and thus preventing the balloon bursting, would be very cool.

AFAIK, that should be pretty easy. Just add ballast. Remember those helium-filled toy balloons that you can fly up and down with fans? They work because at the current altitude, the ballast approximately counterbalances the amount of lift that the balloon provides.

The amount of lift caused by lighter-than-air balloons is proportional to what's around it. Unweighted (and assuming a theoretical zero-mass balloon, zero-mass helium, and a spherical horse), it would rise until the point where the density of the air outside is equal to the density of the gas inside. Weighted, it rises up until the force applied by that density difference over its surface area becomes equal to the mass of the balloon and whatever is hanging under it.

Thus, the only reason the balloons burst is that they don't weigh enough to stop rising at a lower altitude. If they did, they'd just stay there at that altitude until the helium leaks out.

Alternatively, you can use a material that does not stretch as much. One of the reasons that balloons continue to rise beyond a certain point is that they expand at high altitude, thus lowering the density inside. If you limit the stretch, you limit the degree to which they can expand, making the density inside balance the density outside much sooner. Thus, they stop rising sooner (and they also don't explode because they don't ever get that thin).

Either way, there's just one problem: if they don't burst, they could potentially drift for thousands of miles over the course of several days (or even weeks) before they came down, and they could come down anywhere, at any time, into the engine of any passing aircraft, which is probably not what you want, hence the reason this is not typically done.

Re:It's been done

[flyingsquid]

Do I really have to explain this to you guys? When you play Lego, everything's in Lego scale. So for instance, if you send the cat rampaging through your Town sets, he's like a godzilla-sized monster. And the drop off the sofa to the carpet isn't a foot or two off the ground, it's like a huge cliff, and will totally kill your dude (and he totally will NOT survive that, no matter what my so-called-friend Brian Schwarz says, and that is why I don't play Lego with Brian anymore, because he's just really stupid). So are we clear now on how Lego scale works then?

OK, so let's do the math. Low earth orbit is 200-500 miles up, and a minifig is 1.5 inches tall, which is 1/44 the height of an average person. So in Lego scale, 88,000 feet is 3,872,000 feet, or like 733 miles, and so he's totally in space.

Re:It's been done

[Digital Vomit]

You could use a balloon to cover much of the altitude, but you'd need some other means of propulsion to get it to leave the atmosphere entirely.

Hmmm... What if you attached the whole thing to another helium balloon?

Re:It's been done

[Mabhatter]

Well, they're still in high school... They gotta start somewhere.

Frankly, they were irresponsible not to give their Lego dude (or girl) a helmet and air tank. Not to mention the OSHA violations being forced to stand on a ledge at 80k feet with no seatbelt or railings! I think the minifigures need some kind of union against these dangerous experiments.

Lastly, did they make sure their guy wasnt on a no-fly list. He looks European... But with those foreign sounding names national security should have been contacted... They even took pictures of how many people they put in danger!!! At least they didn't attach the balloon to any sharks... Teens and science are just irresponsible.

They're in Canada.

[Bovius]

I glanced at the article and the first word was "Toronto". Apparently that's why this isn't a story about them getting arrested.

Three times the height of a jet?

[mark-t]

I'm pretty sure that jet aircraft are only something like 15 or 20 feet high, measuring from the base. 80,000 feet is considerably higher than three times that distance.

If you mean to say 3 times the maximum altitude of most jet aircraft, say so.

Re:Three times the height of a jet?

[badboy_tw2002]

Irregardless, for all intensive purposes its the same thing. We knew what he mint.

Good job

[CompMD]

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.

I launched a GI-Joe once when I was a kid...

[mark-t]

In 1976, I found a compressed CO2 canister in my schoolyard. When I got home, being the aspiring evil genius that I was, I secured it with tape and contact cement onto the back of one of my GI Joe figures (the 12" ones, not the dopey little 5" ones), and then I used some pliers to cut the end off.

I heard a small "woosh", and then I never saw it again. I have no idea how high it went.

Canadian Space Program

[Anonymous Coward]

It's aboot time...!

Re:It went sooo high...

[CapOblivious2010]

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?

Why not launch a rocket from the baloon

[fervus]

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?