Father-son team sends iPhone into outer space (video)

Article here. How's this for a father-son project? A great dad and his young son worked together on a project to send an iPhone into outer space, carried there by a weather balloon. The entire journey was filmed by the iPhone, including the descent following the explosion of the balloon in space. They used the iPhone's GPS capability to retrieve it, and uploaded the entire video of both the ascent and descent here:

http://vimeo.com/15091562

Now THAT'S a great dad!

I am astounded that even in space, the proximity to the earth's atmosphere was still close enough to carry sounds. You can actually hear the sounds of the iPhone jostling around, you can hear the wind on the ascent and descent, and you can even hear the sound of the weather balloon when it pops, initiating the descent.

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I've been interested in doing one of these "space balloons" for awhile. There seem to be a few misconceptions with some of these launches. First the iPhone didn't do the filming, if you notice they sent up an HD video camera too, the iPhone's purpose was to provide GPS tracking so they could recover the payload, and by extension the awesome video on the video camera.

Secondly, while 100,000 feet is way the heck up there, it's really not space the way we think of it. The air is extraordinarily thin, such that even when the parachutes deploy on these things they barely slow it's fall until it gets down to an altitude where the air is thick enough to provide some resistance, but it's still firmly within the atmosphere. By comparison the International Space Station is considered "low Earth orbit" at almost 200 miles up. So there's still plenty of air to carry sound. I think the other thing that is misleading people into thinking it's higher than it is would be the curvature of the Earth, which in the video is more due to the lens than being up high enough for the Earth to look that curved. The lens on a home video camera isn't generally intended to look accurate when viewing objects hundred of miles away.

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