12 October 2010 One Comment

A father+son team from Park Slope decided NASA wasn’t doing enough to document the stratosphere, and decided to take matters into their own hands.

After testing their “19-inch helium filled weather balloon” in Brooklyn, Luke Geissbuhler and his son Max headed upstate and launched the device, complete with a camera and an iPhone, into space… nearly 19 miles (around 100,000 feet) above the Earth’s surface.

The craft was an 19-inch helium-filled weather balloon attached to a Styrofoam capsule that housed an HD video camera and an iPhone (!).

The camera recorded video of its ascent into the stratosphere, its apogee where the balloon reached its breaking point, and its descent back to earth.

They rigged a parachute to the capsule to aid in its return to Earth, and the iPhone broadcast its GPS coordinates so they could track it down.

The craft landed a mere 30 miles from its launch point in Newburgh, NY, due to a quick ascent and two differing wind patterns. The pair spent eight months researching and test-flying the craft before launching it in August.

As far as we know, this is the first iPhone to get this high!

(write us if it isn’t so…)

Oct 25th, 2010 – UPDATE: Well-known blog MakeZine just published a post about this project and a great infographic too!