The Near Space Adventures Of Bradfield The Bear

December 12, 2025 by Al Williams 2 Comments

Admit it or not, you probably have a teddy bear somewhere in your past that you were — or maybe are — fond of. Not to disparage your bear, but we think Bradfield might have had a bigger adventure than yours has. Bradfield was launched in November on a high-altitude balloon by Year 7 and 8 students at Walhampton School in the UK in connection with Southampton University. Dressed in a school uniform, he was supposed to ride to near space, but ran into some turbulence. The BBC reported that poor Bradfield couldn’t hold on any longer and fell from around 17 miles up. The poor bear looked fairly calm for being so high up.

A camera recorded the unfortunate stuffed animal’s plight. Apparently, a companion plushie, Bill the Badger (the Badger being the Southampton mascot), successfully completed the journey, returning to Earth with a parachute.

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Where (Almost) No GoPro Has Gone Before

May 18, 2016 by Al Williams 30 Comments

What would it be like to ride a six foot rocket to nearly 400,000 feet at Mach 5.5? Thanks to UP Areospace and some GoPro cameras, you can find out.

The rocket was a test for the Maraia Capsule project. Mach 5.5, for reference, is 3,800MPH. It appears several different GoPro cameras took the footage. You can see the upward travel, some great views of Earth, and the return on the video below.

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Global Space Balloon Challenge

January 7, 2015 by Elliot Williams 20 Comments

Looking for a reason to put up a balloon and payload into near-space? Not that one’s necessary, but the Global Space Balloon Challenge has got a variety of good reasons for you to do so, in the form of prizes and swag from their sponsors. Go for highest altitude, best photograph, longest ground track, best on-board science payload, or a bunch more. Have a look through the gallery to check out last year’s winners, including teams that dropped a 3ft paper airplane or floated an R2D2 replica.

Basically all you need to do is register on their website and then go fly a high-altitude balloon between April 10th and 27th. Last year 60 teams took part, and this year they’ve already got 90 teams from 31 countries.

And if you’re just getting into the (hobby? sport?) of high-altitude ballooning, be sure to check out their tutorials and forum. Of course Hackaday has been covering folks’ near-space balloon efforts for a while now too, so you’ve got plenty of reading.

So what are you waiting for? Helium’s not getting any cheaper and spring is on its way. Start planning your balloon launch now.

Throwing Pis Into The Stratosphere

November 14, 2014 by Marsh 26 Comments

It’s always exciting to see the photos from High Altitude Ballooning (HAB) outings. While it’s no surprise that the Raspi is a popular choice—low cost, convenient USB jacks, etc.—this is the first build we’ve seen that uses an OLED during the trip to show real-time data on-screen to be picked up by the on-board webcam. (Though you may have to squint to see it at the bottom middle of the above image).

[Fabrice’s] payload made it to 26,000m, and the screen he chose, an ILSOFT OLED, performed admirably despite the extreme conditions suffered (temperatures can reach -50C). The last time we saw a near-space Raspi payload was a couple of years ago, when [Dave Akerman] was closing in on UK balloon altitude records. [Dave] hasn’t stopped launching balloons, either, testing new trackers and radio modules, as well as his most recent build that sent a Superman action figure to the skies—all recorded in glorious HD.

Check out both [Dave] and [Fabrice’s] blogs for loads of pictures documenting the latest in High Altitude Ballooning, and stay with us after the jump for a quick video of [Fabrice’s] OLED in action.

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High Altitude Balloon Keeps Going

October 19, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 51 Comments

Here’s a post from the AMSAT-UK high altitude balloon blog. It’s a great story about a balloon cruising at about 12km above the Earth completing its sixth circumnavigation of the planet. That post is from October 4th, and two weeks later the balloon is still going strong. Right now it’s over the Baltic heading into Russia with no sign of stopping or popping any time soon.

The balloon was launched July 12, 2014 from Silverstone, UK. In the 100 days since then, this balloon has covered 144168 kilometers and has crossed its launching longitude six times. Even if this balloon weren’t trapped at high latitudes (including coming within 9 km of the pole), this balloon has still travelled more than three times the equatorial circumference of the Earth.

The balloon was built by [Leo Bodnar] a.k.a. [M0XER] with a self-made plastic foil envelope. The solar-powered payload weighs only 11 grams. It’s an exceptional accomplishment and one that has smashed all the amateur high altitude balloon distance records we can find.

Workshop 88 Hosts A Near Space Balloon Contest

September 30, 2011 by Mike Nathan 9 Comments

hackerspaces_in_space

Launching high-altitude balloons to take pictures of the Earth from space is great fun. Heck, even credit card commercials are now suggesting you cash in your rewards points to organize a space balloon adventure for you and your friends.

Capturing snapshots of the Earth from space is such a good time that Workshop 88, a hackerspace located in the Western suburbs of Chicago, is making a contest out of it. They recently kicked off their second annual “Hackerspaces in Space” competition, a contest to see who can build the best near space balloon for under $250. The contest pits individuals, groups, and hackerspaces against one another, assigning each team a score based on the performance of their high-flying rig.

The winner of the contest will have their design replicated by the crew at Workshop 88, who will then hand out the space balloon kits to randomly selected K-12 schools around the country.

If this sounds interesting, but a contest entry just isn’t in the cards, you can always support the kit distribution by funding their Kickstarter project here.

Play-by-play Of A High Altitude Balloon Flight

August 9, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

[Greg Intermaggio] and [Shumit DasGupta] at Techsplosion launched a high altitude balloon last week that climbed to 90,000 feet above sea level somewhere over California. The play-by-play of the flight is one of the better stories we’ve seen on high altitude balloon builds.

The balloon, christened VGER-1, carried a SPOT satellite GPS messanger to send telemetry back to the ground. We’ve seen a few home brew balloon tracking devices, but [Greg] decided to use an off-the-shelf solution for the sake of simplicity. Like other balloons the VGER-1 carried a CanonPowershot camera with CHDK firmware.

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