Kate Allen, Toronto Star, January 25, 2012
Neither Mathew Ho nor Asad Muhammad can vote, or buy beer.
They haven’t been accepted to college yet, though that might change after this story.
The 17-year-olds have already sent a (Lego) man into space.
Two weeks ago, Ho and Muhammad launched a homemade balloon carrying a Lego passenger and four cameras. It fell back down to Earth 97 minutes later with astonishing footage from an estimated 24 kilometres above sea level, three times the typical cruising altitude of a commercial aircraft.
Their jerry-rigged contraption recorded the Lego man’s journey from a soccer pitch in Newmarket to the stratosphere—high enough to see their two-inch astronaut floating above the curvature of our planet, clutching a Canadian flag with the blackness of space behind him.
The project cost $400 and took four months of free Saturdays. It wasn’t a school assignment. They just thought it would be cool.
“We didn’t really believe we could do it until we did,” says Ho.
“It shows a tremendous degree of resourcefulness,” says Dr. Michael Reid, a University of Toronto astrophysics professor. Noting that similar projects had been undertaken by PhD students, he said, “For two 17-year-olds to accomplish this on their own is pretty impressive.”
Ho dreamt up the project two summers ago when he saw an online video of a balloon sent to near space by some Massachusetts Institute of Technology students. He decided to try it himself. He likes building things and has an adventurous streak, he says.
Ho approached Muhammad in the hallway of Agincourt Collegiate Institute, where they are both Grade 12 students. Muhammad has a passion for all things flight-related.
The two met in middle school. Muhammad’s family had just immigrated from Pakistan, and he spoke no English. When other students were ignoring him, Ho walked up and made friends.
Starting this past September, the duo spent their Saturdays at Ho’s kitchen table in Scarborough, drawing up plans and building the balloon.
“People would walk into the house and see us building this fantastical thing with a parachute from scratch, and they would be like, ‘What are you doing?” says Ho. “We’d be like, ‘We’re sending cameras to space.’ They’d be like, ‘Oh, okayyyyy….’”
Ho had already assembled a super-light Styrofoam box to carry the cameras. So with a $500 self-imposed budget in mind, the two scoured Craigslist and Kijiji for used point-and-shoots. They needed Canons, which can be programmed to take photos every 20 seconds without stopping.
Next they sewed the parachute.
“By no means are we, like, seamstresses,” says Ho. “We broke like, what, four needles? It was ridiculous.”
Three weeks of jamming Muhammad’s mom’s sewing machine produced a rip-stop nylon parachute. It has raggedy seams but works perfectly. They tested it by throwing it off the roof of Ho’s dad’s 40-storey condominium, to some residents’ consternation. “People were yelling at me,” says Muhammad.
They ordered a professional, $85 weather balloon online, and bought $160 worth of helium from a party supply store. Ho purchased a special wide-angle video camera he had been coveting with his own money.
Finally, they assembled the whole thing, carefully carving out space inside the Styrofoam container for the three point-and-shoots, the wide-angle video camera, and a cellphone with a downloaded GPS app. They super-glued their Lego astronaut to a gangplank on the outside, and printed off a Canadian flag for him to hold. (They also checked to make sure the flight wouldn’t be dangerous or illegal.)
The pair discovered a website that calculates a weather balloon’s estimated landing spot based on input launch coordinates, prevailing winds, and balloon specs—different weather balloons are designed to burst at different altitudes.
The site kept spitting out Rochester, N.Y., as their balloon’s final landing spot. Muhammad and Ho didn’t like their chances with U.S. Homeland Security.
But one Saturday morning, Ho tried again, and saw the balloon would land near Peterborough. By 2:30 p.m., he and Muhammad were standing in a Newmarket soccer pitch.
They worked quickly, putting mitten-warmers in the box to keep the cameras working in the upper atmosphere. They fired up the four cameras and the cellphone’s GPS app.
Then they inflated the balloon, let it go, and watched their Lego man lift off.
At seven kilometres, the balloon passed cellphone-tower range, and the GPS signal cut out. So they went home and made dumplings.
At 4:12 p.m., Ho’s iPad started to beep—the Lego man had re-entered the atmosphere. A few minutes later, it touched down in a field near Rice Lake, 122 kilometres from its launch point.
The next weekend, the teens drove out to the field, and quickly found the balloon and the Lego man in the brush. “We kind of started jumping, because there was no one around, so you could do that,” says Muhammad.
Based on their calculations, the craft had climbed to about 80,000 feet in one hour and five minutes before the balloon exploded, beginning the Lego man’s 32-minute descent.
When the teens got home and uploaded the two videos and 1,500 photos onto a computer, they started screaming, they say.
Their footage shows the Lego man spinning at an altitude three times higher than the peak of Mount Everest, before the balloon bursts and he starts to plummet. “We never knew it would be this good,” says Ho.
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