by Richard
So it looks like there is hope for the next generation after all. I’m feeling pretty optimistic thanks to a couple of young dudes in Toronto (which is in Canada, ya’ll, for the geography-deficient Americans out there). These young dudes went and did something fantastic. Just because. (click the link there because it’s got a great video of the actual rise and fall of the Lego man.)
These two young dudes, Matthew Ho and Asad Muhammad, sent a man into space. Well, a Lego man, but a man nonetheless.
Seriously.
One day they got an idea in their heads that they thought it would be fun to build a weather balloon, attach a camera and see how high up the balloon would go and what the pictures would look like. So they went ahead and did it.
How awesome is that?
Ho and Muhammad launched a homemade balloon carrying a Lego passenger and four cameras. It fell back down to Earth 97 minutes later with astonishing footage from an estimated 24 kilometres above sea level, three times the typical cruising altitude of a commercial aircraft.
Their jerry-rigged contraption recorded the Lego man’s journey from a soccer pitch in Newmarket to the stratosphere — high enough to see their two-inch astronaut floating above curvature of our planet, clutching a Canadian flag with the blackness of space behind him.
The project cost $400 and took four months of free Saturdays. It wasn’t a school assignment. They just thought it would be cool.
“We didn’t really believe we could do it until we did,” says Ho.
I couldn’t be prouder of these two kids and I don’t even know them. It’s just so fantastic to see kids interested in the world around them and decide, on their own, to go ahead and investigate their interest. And they did it well. They didn’t do some halfway acceptable thing, they went all out. And it shows.
Starting this past September, the duo spent their Saturdays at Ho’s kitchen table in Scarborough, drawing up plans and building the balloon.
“People would walk into the house and see us building this fantastical thing with a parachute from scratch, and they would be like, ‘What are you doing?” says Ho. “We’d be like, ‘We’re sending cameras to space.’ They’d be like, ‘Oh, okayyyyy….’”
This is just some wonderful stuff. There’s great pictures in this video. I mean, that Lego man got so high he could see the curve of the Earth below him. Really this is astonishing video.
I’m guessing we’re going to be hearing more about these two dudes as they get older. My only question is: does the world hold something of interest you’d like to investigate? So go do it.
