Father and Son Send an iPhone Into Space

I am so frequently reminded of how I should totally have stuck with science a little more, if even to send little pieces of mobile tech into space as a hobby. Hindsight is always 20/20. Oh well.

Lucky for me, we have father-son teams like this posting videos of their own adventures to Vimeo, that I might live vicariously through their eyes and know the joys of science for myself.

After a solid eight months of research, the aforementioned father and son (alright, so really just the father – but that kid is the opposite of uncute, regardless) released a weather balloon, HD video camera and iPhone in tow, into the sky for seventy minutes, where it climbed to a peak height of approximately 19 miles. In case you aren’t in the know: that shit’s high.

Why was the iPhone on board in the first place? Well, a possible reason is that the word ‘iPhone’ causes blogs like us to write about things including but not limited to homemade spacecraft. But the far more likely cause is that that balloon was eventually going to pop, and they would need a way to track it when it fell back to Earth. iPhones (and perhaps even moreso, video cameras) are expensive, guys. You don’t just toss one into space and forget.

Anyway, if you’re one of those people rendered breathless every time you see the curvature of the earth, you’d best make sure you’ve some reserve oxygen on hand.