Even if he didn’t quite make it all the way to outer space, as some early reports claimed, a two-inch Lego man, with a fixed grin and a Canadian flag in his hand, did travel about 80,000 feet above the Earth’s surface to the upper stratosphere this month, and he has the stunning video to prove it.
A video posted on YouTube by two Canadian teenagers who launched a Lego man into the stratosphere this month in a homemade craft..
As The Toronto Star reported, the Legonaut was launched into the heavens aboard a Styrofoam capsule attached to a weather balloon as part of a mission conceived and executed by two Canadian high school students, Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad.
During an appearance on Canadian television on Thursday morning, the 17-year-old mission controllers explained that they were inspired to build their $400 craft after hearing about a similar low-fi launch carried out two years ago by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Luckily, the M.I.T. students posted a step-by-step guide to taking pictures of space on their project’s Web site. The most important components of the craft were cameras that could be programmed to take snaps every few seconds during the flight and a cellphone with GPS, which allowed the boys to track down the capsule after the helium-filled balloon popped and it floated back to earth, trailing a homemade parachute.
As my colleague Sam Grobart reported, a cinematographer in Brooklyn recorded some similarly stunning images of the stratosphere in 2010 by encasing a video camera in a Thai food takeout container tethered to a weather balloon.
