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

from the sounds-like-fun dept

Thu, Nov 18th 2010 10:12pm — Mike Masnick

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.

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Filed Under: paper planes, space, weather balloons

11 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 19 Nov 2010 @ 1:35am

OLD NEWS
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- Mike Masnick (profile), 19 Nov 2010 @ 1:43am
  
  Re:
  OLD NEWS
  
  It happened a week ago. We hadn't written about it, I thought it was interesting. Who cares if it's "old"? This isn't some game about who's first.
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El Reg Reader, 19 Nov 2010 @ 2:37am

Re: Old News
It actually happened 28th October.....
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/28/vulture_one_recovered/
.....although it did take them some time to get the pictures out in the wild.
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Siobhan MacDermott, 19 Nov 2010 @ 2:45am

You guys should cover this too - kids in the UK launched a plastic bottle rocket ship with potatoes in it. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8143861/Potato-launched-into-space.html
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Anonymous Coward, 19 Nov 2010 @ 4:27am

Did this infringe on someone's copyright? If not why are you covering it?
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- abc gum, 19 Nov 2010 @ 5:13am
  
  Re:
  If you do not like the "coverage", why do you visit?
  Is it because you wish to interrupt dissemination of ideas or information which you would prefer to remain hidden?
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Near Space Sciences, 19 Nov 2010 @ 6:55am

Been Happening for over 22 years!
This is NOTHING New. This has been happening for over 22 years now. Near Space Sciences http://www.qsl.net/wb9sbd/educators.html Has been doing these flights for 22 years and last May did our 50th flight, check out the video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ0IT4ZwtSo so far from something new.
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Bartman, 19 Nov 2010 @ 7:24am

Who Cares
Who the hell really cares if this is new news or old news. I for one have not heard about it, and I found the video interesting. I would not have seen it had Mike not posted it, as it is not something I would have gone out and looked for myself. Seroiusly, if you do not have something constructive to say, shut the hell up.
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- btrussell (profile), 19 Nov 2010 @ 8:09am
  
  Re: Who Cares
  Seroiusly, if you do not have something constructive to say, shut the hell up.
  
  Ditto.
  I didn't read the article, but I read the comments.
  If you don't want to read either...don't.
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DB, 19 Nov 2010 @ 12:11pm

Not much of a glider
From what I could tell the "glider" spent its time tumbling to the ground rather than actually flying. Not much atmosphere at 89k feet. Might as well have dropped a wad of paper from 89k feet, but that would have been called littering.
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MikeLinPA (profile), 20 Nov 2010 @ 9:17pm

If a paper airplane...
If a paper airplane was successfully glided from 89,000 feet to the ground, how the hell would you find it?
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