Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

If you are looking for an experiment to do with your kids, then there’s not many that will capture their interest and imagination more quickly than offering to send a camera into space.

That’s exactly what Luke Geissbuhler decided to do after 8 months of careful planning and a lot of crossed fingers. But the results were worth it as you can see in the video above.

The camera used was a $260 GoPro HD Hero. It was positioned in a foam casing and surrounded by hand warmers in attempt to stop it freezing as it reached the edge of out atmosphere. The ascent was done using a weather balloon which will rise to the point where the lack of atmosphere allows it to expand to breaking point.



At its highest point the camera reach 100,000 ft and the balloon had expanded to 19 ft in diameter. Then the rapid decent of up to 150mph even with the parachute deployed, which with winds of 100mph could have carried the camera hundreds of miles off course, but luckily brought it down just 30 miles from the launch site.

The camera was tracked via GPS using an iPhone and ended up landing 50 ft up, lodged in a tree. A small LED light on the casing allowed it to be spotted late the same night, recovered, and the fantastic video footage shared with us all.
http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/homemade-spacecraft-reaches-100000-ft-films-the-whole-way-2010102/