Bryan Chan and his friends, students at the time in Arizona, attached a GoPro to a weather balloon and sent in up to space, to the stratosphere to be precise. They did this back in 2013 but weren’t able to immediately locate their contraption, the camera was actually missing for two years before it was discovered recently by a woman on a hike. She traced the camera’s owners who got it back with some mesmerizing footage.
When Chan and friends started out with this project they put in months of planning and at one point even decided against it since the costs of procuring helium were higher than they had originally expected.
The launch was planned with a specific time and place so that the GoPro would land in an area with cell coverage, but they ran into an unexpected problem, the coverage map that they were relying upon was not accurate so they never got a signal from the rig when it landed back on Earth.
Fast forward two years and a woman who’s on a hike locates the rig, she happens to work at AT&T and brought it back to the store to identify the SIM card’s owner. That give her all the information needed to return the rig.
Chan and co’s rig hit a maximum altitude of 98,644 feet and was airborne for 98 minutes, landing some 50 miles away from its launch site.