Kids these days are becoming more innovative than ever. It wasn’t too long ago that we reported how a teen reportedly created a search engine more accurate than Google’s, and now according to a report, two teenage girls from Seattle have successfully launched a balloon to the edge of space.
The girls, Kimberly and Rebecca Yeung, built their spacecraft out of wood and broken arrow shafts. Despite the makeshift nature of their spacecraft, it had somehow managed to get up to the edge of space and go up twice as high as a commercial aircraft, thanks to a weather balloon that was filled with helium and a flight computer that helped track their creation.
What was even more impressive is that the two girls have video footage to prove their little adventure, as you can see in the video embedded above. The spacecraft managed to travel to 78,000 feet where the weather balloon popped, and it landed about 50 miles from their original launch site.
According to Rebecca who is only 10, “Surprisingly, the curve is almost the same. It curves down, curves back up, bursts, and curves back down again. The difference is we miscalculated the weight of our payload, so our ascent rate was off, and the prediction calculations showed the balloon at a faster pace than it actually was, causing it to have a bigger curve than it would’ve.”
The youngsters have also put together a list of things that they have learnt from this experience, so who knows where their next spacecraft will end up.
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