High School Students Send Lego Man 24 Kilometers High 115
First time accepted submitter AbilityLiving writes "Two high schoolers have launched a Lego Man to 80,000 feet — three times the height of a jet — in a homebrew project that involved a few Ebay-purchased cameras, a giant helium balloon and a star-ship full of ingenuity."
Re:It went sooo high... (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder how tall you could build a tower of legos before the weight crushed the legos making up the bottom level?
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When I saw the title of this story ("High School Students Send Lego Man 24 Kilometers High"), my first interpretation was that some students had built a 24-kilometer-high man out of legos, and then sent it somewhere... I was wondering how many legos it took, and how much the postage was!
I got stuck on 3 times the height of a jet. That would be closer to 80 feet than 80,000.
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Post would be about $3,000,000 or about £75
It's been done (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'd be more impressed if someone found a way to NOT get into space with a helium filled weather balloon.
Maintaining a constant altitude, and thus preventing the balloon bursting, would be very cool.
Re:It's been done (Score:5, Funny)
Sending a balloon to 80,000 ft is not "into space". So far, no one has actually managed to get a weather balloon to exit the atmosphere. Actually doing so would be much, much more impressive than "kids stuck camera, gps logger, and random object in a styrofoam box and brought back pretty pictures".
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Wouldn't it pretty much be impossible to use a balloon alone to get any object into space? Space is where there's no more atmosphere and before that point, the helium or whatever material makes the balloon lighter than air would start to become heavier than what it displaces thereby eliminating any buoyant force.
You could use a balloon to cover much of the altitude, but you'd need some other means of propulsion to get it to leave the atmosphere entirely.
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That would be my point.
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In theory you could create an ultra-low density structure that would reach escape velocity before it exits the atmosphere. Sort of like releasing a tennis ball from the bottom of a pool and watching it pop out of the water when it reaches the surface. We're going to need some serious advances in material sciences to scale that sort of thing up though. Also issues of aerodynamic drag, etc.
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Nope, wouldn't work.
Buoyancy in air is caused by a slight difference in the total momentum from collisions with air molecules below and above the object. The air above has a slightly lower pressure, which means the (lots of) tiny molecules slam into the balloon slightly less frequently (density) and/or with slightly less speed (temperature) than those below. This difference matches the weight of a similar volume of air, which is logical in a stable atmosphere. That's why objects lighter than air go up.
As so
Re:It's been done (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm... What if you attached the whole thing to another helium balloon?
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You could use a balloon to cover much of the altitude, but you'd need some other means of propulsion to get it to leave the atmosphere entirely.
Hmmm... What if you attached the whole thing to another helium balloon?
One more balloon might not be enough. You might need to add more. To those who would argue that this isn't going to work and ask "what's supporting the final balloon?", I'd have to say "You're very clever, young man, very clever... but it's balloons all the way up!"
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Wouldn't you be able to do that by weighing it down enough that it would be insufficiently buoyant once it gets to less-dense altitudes of air?
Re:It's been done (Score:5, Informative)
OK, so let's do the math. Low earth orbit is 200-500 miles up, and a minifig is 1.5 inches tall, which is 1/44 the height of an average person. So in Lego scale, 88,000 feet is 3,872,000 feet, or like 733 miles, and so he's totally in space.
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When you play Lego, everything's in Lego scale.
I can't be the only one who's used a 1x1x1 round on top of a 1x1x1 square as a smaller person... pretty iconic but it was good enough for Defender. Or for that matter, built epic scale lego miniature fleets.
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I wish I had mod points. Awesome.
Re:It's been done (Score:5, Informative)
AFAIK, that should be pretty easy. Just add ballast. Remember those helium-filled toy balloons that you can fly up and down with fans? They work because at the current altitude, the ballast approximately counterbalances the amount of lift that the balloon provides.
The amount of lift caused by lighter-than-air balloons is proportional to what's around it. Unweighted (and assuming a theoretical zero-mass balloon, zero-mass helium, and a spherical horse), it would rise until the point where the density of the air outside is equal to the density of the gas inside. Weighted, it rises up until the force applied by that density difference over its surface area becomes equal to the mass of the balloon and whatever is hanging under it.
Thus, the only reason the balloons burst is that they don't weigh enough to stop rising at a lower altitude. If they did, they'd just stay there at that altitude until the helium leaks out.
Alternatively, you can use a material that does not stretch as much. One of the reasons that balloons continue to rise beyond a certain point is that they expand at high altitude, thus lowering the density inside. If you limit the stretch, you limit the degree to which they can expand, making the density inside balance the density outside much sooner. Thus, they stop rising sooner (and they also don't explode because they don't ever get that thin).
Either way, there's just one problem: if they don't burst, they could potentially drift for thousands of miles over the course of several days (or even weeks) before they came down, and they could come down anywhere, at any time, into the engine of any passing aircraft, which is probably not what you want, hence the reason this is not typically done.
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I'm pretty sure that, in general, balloons aren't strong enough to exert significant pressure on their contents. So, close enough, the gas inside the balloon is always at the same pressure as the gas outside. And if the gas inside has a lower molecular weight, it's always going to be less dense than the gas outside.
You could include a compressor to move some of the gas into a pressure vessel, but that would add SERIOUS weight, not to mention power requirements.
Wonder if you could use hydrogen as the lift ga
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpressure_balloon [wikipedia.org]
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I'd be more impressed if someone found a way to NOT get into space with a helium filled weather balloon.
Maintaining a constant altitude, and thus preventing the balloon bursting, would be very cool.
That happened just about a month and a half ago [theregister.co.uk], with a balloon flight from California to the Mediterranean sea. The short version is that eventually the UV at that altitude will degrade the balloon's integrity and it will pop, but it did last several days.
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Not that complex really, a light weight pressure relief valve that opens and release pressure at a value lower that then tensile strength of the balloon. Then there would be a choice of balloon colour to absorb heat.
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That's a very complicated and heavier way of doing what's already being done - using smaller balloons inside the larger one to alter the pressure (and thus density and thus lift) of the larger balloon. (Saving the weight of the storage tanks, which is the ruling factor.)
http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/blimp1.htm [howstuffworks.com]
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Pre-coffee stupid question of the morning: couldn't you have a few fans pointing in such a way that they pull the balloon downward? You know, like retro-rockets. Or you could just weigh the thing down enough to balance it out.
I bet if you had a sort of sandbag or water tank and a nice, simple, and cheap circuit board in a helium balloon, you could continually rebalance the weight as the helium dissipates. (So for example, when some helium is lost and the balloon starts descending, a bit of water or sand is
Re:It's been done (Score:5, Informative)
And it is cool every single time. Seriously, if nothing else, it shows that reaching space is something that anyone can do. Instead of complaining that it's being done to death, why not improve on it? I fully plan on being part of the me-too crowd of space-photography. Once that's done, maybe I can do something to improve on it. Who knows? Someone will probably beat me to the "cooler" part. But that's what makes it fun.
Re:It's been done (Score:5, Funny)
Well, they're still in high school... They gotta start somewhere.
Frankly, they were irresponsible not to give their Lego dude (or girl) a helmet and air tank. Not to mention the OSHA violations being forced to stand on a ledge at 80k feet with no seatbelt or railings! I think the minifigures need some kind of union against these dangerous experiments.
Lastly, did they make sure their guy wasnt on a no-fly list. He looks European... But with those foreign sounding names national security should have been contacted... They even took pictures of how many people they put in danger!!! At least they didn't attach the balloon to any sharks... Teens and science are just irresponsible.
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Doesn't mean it's news, or that it matters.
They're in Canada. (Score:4, Funny)
I glanced at the article and the first word was "Toronto". Apparently that's why this isn't a story about them getting arrested.
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Apparently the safety regulations are pretty lax up there in the Great White North; the space man didn't even wear a helmet.
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I glanced at the article and the first word was "Toronto". Apparently that's why this isn't a story about them getting arrested.
Actually, their landing site was going to be in New Hampshire and they didn't like the idea of having to deal with Homeland Security. So they waited a few weeks for the conditions to change so that it would land on Canadian soil. So there's still an element of sadness to this very cool story.
Lego Man... (Score:1)
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In this case he's redefining the term "Flying Brick".
Waste of helium (Score:1)
We already know how these things go.
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Three times the height of a jet? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm pretty sure that jet aircraft are only something like 15 or 20 feet high, measuring from the base. 80,000 feet is considerably higher than three times that distance.
If you mean to say 3 times the maximum altitude of most jet aircraft, say so.
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If you mean to say 3 times the maximum altitude of most jet aircraft, say so.
Or the typical cruising altitude of commercial jet airliners. Regardless, very clumsily put.
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Pedantic much?
Re:Three times the height of a jet? (Score:5, Funny)
Irregardless, for all intensive purposes its the same thing. We knew what he mint.
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Also, it's "intents and purposes"...
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Irregardless, for all intensive purposes its the same thing. We knew what he mint.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irregardless
Also, it's "intents and purposes"...
Wow! A double WHOOSH. Is no one going to complain about "its" instead of "it's", or "mint" for a trifecta? Or both, so we can see the mythical quadfecta WHOOSH?
I suppose I may have messed that up. But I'm guessing that most pendants will probably be so excited about pointing these things out, that they will post their corrections before reading to my post. ;-)
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You mispelled "porpoises".
Also "new".
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More like 64 feet high (for a 747). Nowhere near 80,000 feet, I'll grant you.
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In-flight WIFI? sweet.
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I knew someone was going to reply something like that :-)
OK, I admit, I was lying, I wasn't in the act of flying at that precise time.
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>The jet I'm currently flying (A320, a pretty ordinary passenger jet)
For heaven's sake, put down the computer and pay attention to flying!
And I thought texting & driving was bad . . . :)
hawk
Good job (Score:5, Interesting)
Good for these kids. I don't agree that this should be big news, as this is becoming a fairly common project for advanced high school students. I mentored a team of high school students in the Kansas City area that sent up balloons last fall. They designed and built the payload, fitting all the instrumentation and cameras. One made it to 97,000 ft. The other managed to fly all the way to Illinois. In both cases the payload was recovered undamaged. They got some *awesome* video and pictures.
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Numbers.... (Score:3)
"80,000 feet — three times the height of a jet "
Oh, where to begin...
Per Wikipedia:
Height of Airbus A380: 80.2 ft
Highest known altitude attained by a conventional jet-powered airplane: 123,523 feet.
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I think the idea was the implied cruising altitude. Which is between 25,000 and 30,000ft in most cases.
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NASA's X-15 hit 354,200 feet in 1963, after being launched off a B-52 (also a jet) at 45,000 feet. This is the author's "Libraries of Congress" moment.
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Good point. However, the B-52 it was launched from was already above half the altitude this balloon burst at, and B-52s aren't exactly the height of today's aviation technology.
The claim of 3x the whatever of a jet is complete crap.
I launched a GI-Joe once when I was a kid... (Score:4, Funny)
In 1976, I found a compressed CO2 canister in my schoolyard. When I got home, being the aspiring evil genius that I was, I secured it with tape and contact cement onto the back of one of my GI Joe figures (the 12" ones, not the dopey little 5" ones), and then I used some pliers to cut the end off.
I heard a small "woosh", and then I never saw it again. I have no idea how high it went.
D'oh... hit submit too soon. (Score:2)
Canadian Space Program (Score:4, Funny)
It's aboot time...!
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At least this group is smart enough to not claim (Score:2)
that they reached space.
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At least this group is smart enough to not claim that they reached space.
Of course not, but the Toronto Star [thestar.com] certainly has trouble understanding the difference between "very high" and "space". Two front-page news stories on this in one day - a bit silly all things considered.
I assumed this was about a clambake roadtrip. (Score:2)
I guess I forgot this was slashdot and not erowid.
I hate to burst their bubble but (Score:2)
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Skydiver (Score:2)
So, there's this guy on his first solo parachute jump. When the plane reaches the drop zone, he jumps. When he reaches the proper altitude, he pulls the main ripcord.
Nothing.
After a few seconds, he remembers his training and pulls the cord on the emergency chute. Still nothing. Now he's starting to panic.
Looking at the ground rapidly approaching, he notices a figure rapidly ascending towards him. "Odd", he things to himself. Nevertheless, when this other guy comes withing earshot, he yells over, "Hey bud
I used to enjoy slashdot (Score:1)
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Now it is an intensely irritating site with all the crap that is posted and re-posted at the start of every comment page on every story. For fuck sake grow up or fuck off and let some intelligent - and sometimes funny - comment return to what once was a great site.
Preach it brother! Every time something remotely cool is posted (like a pair of kids doing a cool science experiment just because they feel like it) along some the jackasses to piss on it or pick pedantic holes in the wording of the article or try to gain karma points by way of some sad attempt at humour. I used to come here to see informed opinion, nowadays I'm more inclined to just RTFA and ignore the inevitable inane comments.
I thought jets where typically smaller (Score:1)
Two high schoolers have launched a Lego Man to 80,000 feet â" three times the height of a jet
The tail height of a 747 is less than 70 feet. But a jet with a height of over 26,000 feet that is amazing. I wonder what altitude such a huge airplane could reach?
LEGO (Score:2, Insightful)
It's called a "minifig". Get your terminology right, please.
Why not launch a rocket from the baloon (Score:3, Interesting)
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Well, for one thing, orbit isn't about altitude. It's about matching horizontal velocity to the perpendicular force of gravity, so that by the time gravity would put you into the ground, the ground isn't there any more. Altitude helps, because gravity has a lot more work to do at that distance.
Technically you could orbit at 50,000 feet of altitude if we didn't have an atmosphere and you had sufficient horizontal velocity.
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If you're willing to apply thrust you can orbit a lot lower than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_junk (Score:1)
Yay Kessler Syndrome! Thanks High School students for your contribution!
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AC is a necessary option to have that facilitates an open exchange of ideas.
That sounds good in theory, so much so that I must concede a valid point.
However in practice, AC's seem to troll as a rule.
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Note, I am aware that GreatBunzinni could in effect be sockpuppet attacking himself in some sort of reverse-psycology attack on his enemies. In that case he will end up getting himself modded down often enough to make it a Pyrrhic victory. If everyone involved gets modded to oblivion, I will consider it... Mission Fucking Accomplished.
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They're all evil.
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Yeesh - it's their first try at this. Can we let them enjoy the basics before we start bugging them about why they didn't create a million-dollar launch vehicle?
Making the front page just means it's a slower news day and it's a happy feel-good story. ("Kids did something useful! News at 11!")