Lego Man In Space
Space the final frontier, to boldly go where no Lego man has gone before? Two young men from Canada recently launched a Lego man 78,000 feet into the atmosphere! Legos are a popular construction type toy made of plastic, that are normally blocks that interlock. They are often seen in parody type videos on YouTube as well. But this Lego man is real and he made it 78,000 feet above the earth's surface!
But is that actually into space? I began researching and found that there doesn't seem to be a definitive answer because there is no actual boundary between the earth's atmosphere and outerspace. I did find this little bit of information however. There's something called the Karman line which is used to determine the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space and is at an altitude of 100 km which is 62 miles above the Earth, which by my calculations is 327,360 feet.
The two young gentleman are Asad Muhammad and Mathew Ho from Toronto, Canada according to a news story. Apparently they saved up a few hundred dollars and "just for fun" decided to launch a Lego man into pretty much outer space, as far as I am concerned, Karman Line or not!
It seems they saved up some money and bought a pretty capable and apparently high-grade weather balloon online somewhere. They are said to have attached four video cameras and a global positioning system so that they could track it and locate it later. It seems they had it all figured out as far as when to launch, wind speeds and whatever other data they needed. It's just an amazing accomplishment for these two young gentleman considering they are only seventeen!
The video footage is absolutely amazing to watch. You can see Mr. Lego man going past the clouds until you can actually see the curvature of the Earth! At 78,000 feet or so, the balloon was said to have failed and Lego Man From Space returned to Earth! What's next for these guys, a Lincoln log space station? Or someday actually working for NASA? We shall see.
