Monday, September 14, 2015

Get These Kids a Grant!

Two Seattle sisters still in elementary school created a helium-balloon craft that took their payload -- a picture of their cat and a Lego R2-D2 -- to the edge of space, 78,000 feet in the air, and recovered it when it landed.

Rebecca Yeung, 10, and Emily Yeung, 8, mounted small cameras on their craft, named Loki Lego Launcher after said feline and posted the videos on YouTube. They also padded it with styrofoam in case of a water landing and used a GPS device to find it when it came down four hours later. The picture at the link points out how the sisters used a variety of power tools to form their craft from broken arrow shafts.

Meanwhile, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced it will have a TV channel in November and stood around and waved while the only nation capable of putting a human being into orbit sent some folks up the the International Space Station.

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