This article appears in print in the February 2018 issue. Click here to subscribe.

Rebecca and Kimberly Yeung are flying high. Over the past three summers, the Queen Anne sisters, ages 13 and 11 respectively, have conducted a series of experiments involving the launch of weather balloons carrying cameras and astronomical instruments into the stratosphere—and their efforts have caught the attention of the scientific community.

In April 2016, the sisters exhibited their spacecraft and findings in the State Dining Room during the White House Science Fair, when they met President Obama and explained their work. Since then, they have served as the keynote speakers at the “Girls Rule!” conference in Oregon for girls ages 9–14 involved in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), visited NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and Kennedy Space Center, and collaborated with NASA and the Montana Space Grant Consortium on their third launch last summer. Their original space flyer is being retired from service and is slated for display beginning in March at Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry.

The girls’ father, Winston Yeung, originally encouraged his daughters to pursue a project that would involve setting goals and finding solutions. After narrowing their options, they chose space launches over raising chickens and devised the “Loki Lego Launcher” project, naming it after their cat, Loki, and the Lego figures they attach to their spacecraft. By launching balloons into the stratosphere—Earth’s second major layer of atmosphere—their instruments escaped atmospheric interference, which allowed their camera to photograph the blackness of space and the curvature of the earth, both goals from the outset.