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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 glanced at the article and the first word was "Toronto". Apparently that's why this isn't a story about them getting arrested.
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.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
It's aboot time...!
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".
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.
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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.
Hmmm... What if you attached the whole thing to another helium balloon?
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
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.