Ask sisters Kimberly and Rebecca Yeung about their Labor Day weekend and they could legitimately say, It was out of this world.
With a craft they constructed using light-weight wood and arrow shafts, Kimberly, 8, and Rebecca, 10, launched a weather balloon that reached a height of 78,000 feet. How do they know? Other than the two GoPro cameras aboard that recorded the flight, the girls outfitted their craft with a flight computer to record data, such as temperature and distance traveled.
Photo: Winston Yeung/YouTube
They named their craft the Loki Lego Launcher. Loki is their cat whose cutout picture, along with a Lego R2-D2, served as the passenger.
The building of their ship and the journey into near space was documented by the website, GeekWire.
The girls thoughtfully narrate the video, explaining their process as well as the lessons they learned from the flight. The girls are shown building the craft in their garage using what looks like a junior set of power tools.
They do all of the work though their parents can be seen assisting with take off in central Washington and the eventual tracking of the landed craft.
Photo: Winston Yeung/YouTube
They picked central Washington “so that our spaceship wouldn’t land on anyone, except maybe a cow,” said one of the sisters in the video below.
Sure enough, once the balloon burst, the craft landed in a cow field – near a pile of cow poop the girls said – about 50 miles away from the site of the launch. The family found the craft thanks to a GPS tracker on it.
Source: GeekWire
