Don’t Put That Bear
Where There’s No Air

Space walking bears

Space walking bears

British teddy bears strapped to a helium weather balloon reached the edge of space, an altitude of 100,000 feet, daring the nearly airless night in tiny spacesuits made by school children.

After rising to an altitude of around 100,000ft, a webcam caught their ‘space-walk’ for posterity before the helium balloon burst.

They then fell to Earth before a parachute opened automatically to provide a soft landing.

During the 2 hour 9 minute flight the radio on board broadcast the location of the craft to a chase team on the ground…

They landed just 50 miles from their launch pad by Churchill College in Cambridge.

My 7-year-old Sierra is quite interested in science, but if she was involved in this project I know she’d worry about the teddies. This crew met a happy ending, but that isn’t always the case:

During ten previous experiments, half have ended up ditching in the North Sea. One disappeared over Scandinavia before washing up on the coast of Denmark.

Sierra definitely would not like that.

[Thanks to David Klaus for the story.]

2 thoughts on “Don’t Put That Bear
Where There’s No Air

  1. Not just kids: One of the reasons the “jet-pack” Lisa made for some of her costumes has the “bear-o-metric” chamber (clear plastic chamber in the middle of the pack in which her Kuma Bear rides) is that it’s the only way she can be sure of keeping the bear safe while still keeping him with her.

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