Launching A Paper Plane 89,000 Feet And Having It Glide Back To Earth

from the sounds-like-fun dept

A little while back, we had a story about a guy who launched a camera 100,000 feet in the air via a weather balloon, and put together a sweet video of the experience. In the comments, people pointed to numerous examples of similar (and equally cool) experiments. It seems like it’s a pretty popular pastime. In fact, it turns out that online tech news site The Register has been hard at work sponsoring a similar effort, but this one took it a step further, by crafting a “paper plane” (really a glider) as the key payload. That paper plane has now gone up to 89,000 feet and safely made it back down, with lots of photos and videos:

Of course, I actually think the video from the balloon+camera project was a lot more compelling. This one is obscured for most of the flight, which sorta makes it kind of pointless. Still, it’s kind of cool to see all of these projects in action, even if most of them falsely claim to be reaching “space.” Altitudes from 89,000 to 100,000 feet may look really cool, but it’s really nowhere near actually crossing into space.

Filed Under: paper planes, space, weather balloons