AURORA, Colo. (KMGH) – NASA is not the only game in town. An Aurora, Colorado family has a space program of their own and it's yielding some amazing results!
The Photos family recently posted a YouTube video of their latest space adventure – a GoPro camera attached to a weather balloon and then launched over Denver.
The balloon reached the stratosphere, which begins around 10 miles above the ground, and captured a unique perspective of the Front Range from 100,000 feet aloft.
Watch the incredible video:
At the end of the video, you can see the GoPro camera fall back to earth. Kevin Photos says the camera was lodged in a specially made container made out of Styrofoam and toilet paper rolls to protect it during re-entry.
The camera was fitted with a GPS tracker so the family could find where it fell. However, the rig’s parachute failed to deploy and crashed down onto a residential street in Parker. The video card was salvageable, but Photos said the crash was a “mistake that cannot be repeated and should be discouraged.”
Photos says this was not the family’s first foray into space. They launched a balloon with a similar setup a couple of weeks ago, but the video of that adventure sits at the bottom of Lake Loveland after the camera came down in the wrong place.
Photos says he loves aviation and does these types of balloon launches for fun. He says this was about as “high as I’m likely to get.”
