Some of you that are friends on FB have seen all of this stuff but I'm too excited to keep it on FB alone so here's my story...

My wife and I launched a high altitude balloon to 90,000 feet above the Earth. Attached were two cameras taking video & still shots of the journey, along with some personal affects commemorating someone very special to me & a future release of my Semi Korosiya toy.

You might be wondering why I’m doing all of this!?? Well, it’s in honor of my mother who passed away earlier this year. She has always encouraged me to follow my dreams and promoted my talents. She has supported me in every endeavor, from tattooing to screen printing to my Cop A Squat Toys venture. I wanted to do something special in memory of someone who has always believed in me. My next figure will be dedicated to her, and bears her favorite colors…

Here's a link to the Flickr set, it contains all 3225 photos taken by my GoPro camera. The video(s) will be released in the next month or so, it features the toy release that also made the journey. Here are a few sample shots from the Flickr set. Enjoy and let me know if you find anything cool in the shots, there's so many it's hard to go through them all.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/23519292@N ... 044241970/

This is right after launch probably around 30 seconds after I let go of the box. That baseball field is where we launched from.


This is approximately 25-30,000 feet up.




This is at the balloons highest point, approximately 90,000 feet. You can see where the balloon finally expanded to the breaking point. The ball of gas to the left is the helium used to lift it that high. The shreds to the right are pieces of the balloon. When we launched the balloon it was about 8' wide, it grows to about 10-15 times that size by the time it reaches 90,000 feet until it can't stretch anymore and explodes. There is a 5' diameter parachute that helps it back to earth safely.

Wow, that's pretty cool. Looks like it's almost on the edge of our atmosphere and space. Interesting how gravity hold things in.

Sorry to hear about your mother, parents passing always is the toughest. What a nice way to see her out. The last 2 pics here are stunning. Can't wait to see your mothers color way as well.

cool idea, man.

90,000 feet is about 2/3 of the way through the Stratosphere. Believe it or not there are two more layers of atmosphere but yeah basically the edge of space. This went higher than those annoying spy planes. We had to register a flight path with the FAA before launch and they alerted the military of the balloons flight path since they were the only people that fly anything that high.

I was just going to ask that actually (If anyone can just launch something or you had to get permission). I guess I should have known that though. Sorry to hear about your Mom. No one can replace Mom.

Nope, she was the best!

Honestly you don't have to ask for permission you just call them and tell them you're doing it. Which I found odd. The guy from the local FAA tower said "meh ok we don't fly anything over 35k feet anyway so..." I'm like damn fella to get to 90k feet you gotta go through that 35k feet so it seems like you need to know. Also attached to the payload was an FAA regulated reflector, even from the ground once the balloon was out of sight when the sun would hit it just right you could see that.

I'm going to do another one with a friend hopefully by the end of the year, gonna send up a tattoo machine and some "shine". Hopefully this time it will be easier to find and recover the package. The helium is the expensive part, well after the camera's but those are at least paid for now.

Saw it on FB, Adam, but it’s great to get the full story here. What a great, touching tribute to your mom- awesome in the true sense of the word. Cannot wait to see the vid of SK at the edge of space!

I’d love to hear about the landing! Where did it come down? Plans to retrieve it, or have you already? I assumed you used some sort of GPS hardware…

There are all sorts of HAB predictors out there so you have an idea of where your payload will land. You have to do some calculations to figure it out but it can be done. Things like payload weight, ascent rate needed to reach desired height which tells you how much helium you'll need to get the lift to reach that height. The predictors take all that into account and find local jet stream forecasts and tell you roughly where it will land. The trick is to get fast enough ascent rate to go through the jet stream quickly so the up to 120mph winds don't push your balloon so far. Remember it makes to trips through the jet stream once going up and once coming down. It landed about 40 miles, driving time, away from the launch site which was actually about 20 miles closer than the predictor had suggested. I used a Spot GPS tracking device. The problem is with those devices it only checks in every 10 minutes and can only transmit up to 20-25k feet up. So I only had two GPS pings before it was out of distance, then just over 2 hours of radio silence before it was below 20k feet again and had a chance to ping back it's coordinates. It landed 100 feet up in an oak tree, where it sat for over three weeks before I found a friend that knew an harborist and animal rescue climber. Thankfully he was kind enough to climb the tree for free and retrieve it. It was fairly easy to get the damn thing to 90k feet but that last 100 sucked. The whole time I just knew my cameras where toast but luckly the heat didn't affect them since the tree had such a thick canopy it pretty much stayed in the shade for 3 weeks. Also the cameras I used are pretty hardcore, the GoPro for the still shots and the Contour for the video. All in all it was a ton of fun but pretty stressful at the same time.

WOW! This is awesome!

This is incredible! Awesome work!