Sarah and I hit the road at 6am so that we could get west to launch early in the morning, when the winds were calmest. With all that and a bit of duct tape for good measure, we were ready to go. It turns out it is very hard to track a device that is tens of thousands of feet off the ground, but the best solution I could find was Garmin’s GPS tracking device, which uses cellphone service to broadcast its GPS location, which could then be viewed from Garmin’s website or on a mobile app, in real time. I found a balloon trajectory forecast site that gave me a pretty good sense of which way it would drift, but that still wasn’t enough precision to actually track it down. Since the prevailing winds generally blow west to east, I knew we couldn’t launch from the Boston area or it’d end up in the sea for sure.īut knowing it wasn’t in the ocean wasn’t good enough. My biggest concern was that it would land somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean and I’d never be able to recover the video. But I expected the rig to drift pretty far from wherever it was launched. I knew the balloon was probably going to ascend to almost 100,000ft (about 19mi up) before it would pop in the vacuum of space and the parachute would carry it in for landing. Getting it to land safely and then recovering the camera would be the hard part. The video recording device was a GoPro HD Hero that I found for cheap on Amazon.īut getting the rig to float across the sky and record video along the way was the easy part. I found a big weather balloon on Amazon for less than $50, a parachute for $30 and then assembled some supplies from the local hardware store to build the capsule. I decided a video camera rigged to a weather balloon would be a great start. I knew I wouldn’t actually be able to travel to outer space, but I still wanted to somehow capture the awe of it myself.
It had always been a dream of mine to see the earth like that, and watching Felix’s live stream got me so amped up, I couldn’t hold off any longer. Suddenly, you could see both vastness of space and the bright blue curvature of the earth over his shoulder, and it took my breath away. Like most of the nation, last weekend I watched the Red Bull Stratos live stream of Felix Baumgartner’s record breaking jump.įor me, one of the best parts of the stream was the moment when the cabin finally depressurized and the door slid open.
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