Tag: space exploration

Canadian High Schoolers Send Lego Astronaut Into Space!

lego astronaut

Canada’s first astronaut?

For four and a half months, Canadian high school students Matthew Ho and Asad Muhammed spent every Saturday working on a project.  No, it wasn’t restoring an old car, it was building a homemade satellite/space vehicle.  Somehow, they not only managed to build their spacecraft, they managed to send a Lego minifigure into space.  It’s a shame it wasn’t one of the official Lego astronauts, but the important thing is Canada has gotten someone into orbit!  It’s a victory for the Canadian space program!

The pair were inspired by other videos of people sending balloons into space, possibly these guys.  The two spent only $400 to build their spacecraft, though the planning was meticulous.  They wanted their Lego man to launch and return to them in Canada to avoid having to cross the border to retrieve him.  The ascent took an hour and five minutes; after the balloon popped, the descent took only 30 minutes.  The homemade spacecraft consisted of a lightweight Styrofoam box carrying three point-and-shoot cameras, a wide-angle video camera, and a cellphone with GPS to track the landing. The balloon was bought online and filled with helium from a party store; two mitten warmers were used to ensure the electronics didn’t get too cold on the trip into space.

Space Shuttle Endeavour’s Last Flight Is Today!

 

Man, today is a busy day.  Between the NFL Draft and the royal wedding, there’s a lot going on.  To add to the list, there’s another historic milestone about to go down that’s expected to draw 700,000 people to the beaches of Florida.  The Space Shuttle Endeavour will be making its last flight today; there’s one more shuttle flight, and then the space shuttle program undertaken by NASA over 30 years ago will end.

Over 45,000 observation tickets have been distributed by NASA, and nearly 700.000 more are expected to line the beaches and cram into beach-side parking lots to tailgate and watch the space shuttle flight.  From across the country, people have been trickling into the area surrounding the Kennedy Space Center for a chance to catch a glimpse of one of the last space shuttle flights.  Now, it’s up for the weather to cooperate until 3:45 PM Eastern time, when Endeavour takes off from Cape Canaveral to deliver an Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer and various other spare parts to the International Space Station.

This is Endeavor’s last flight, but the real last flight for the space shuttles will be the June 28th flight of Atlantis; Discovery’s last flight was February 24.