Paper planes launched from weather balloon

These folks were hired by Samsung to launch 200 paper planes containing memory cards from a weather balloon sent over Germany. Anyone who finds one of these planes is asked to visit the Project Space Planes website and make a note of it.

The balloon, filled with helium gas and carrying a load of paper planes, took 2.6 hours to rise to 37,339 metres (that's at the edge of space!), where it burst and took only 40 minutes to fall back to earth. It landed in a forest just south east of Berlin, where our team had to use a very long pole to retrieve the payload from the top of a tree.
The hand-crafted paper planes with their precious cargo of Samsung SD memory cards were released at around 36,3500 metres and could land anywhere.

Project Space Planes

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Anonymous

At least they’re not dumping toxic computer waste in countries outside Europe. Well not the last bit anyway.
Anonymous

I see they haven’t really confirmed any of the finds as of today. Not too exciting. You’d think they would keep up with this better.
tlwest

Now put the nice little auto-start virus on each SD and you’ve got yourself a nice little bot-net when people plug the the SDs in to see what’s on them.

My machine caught a space-virus!
farkinga

Come on – that’s really cool! The amount of pollution is going to be pretty minimal, but I agree they could have picked a better language/country pairing.

Maybe this has to do with laws for launching weather balloons? I expect it’s would cause problems to replicate this stunt over Chicago, for example, even if that would prove to be a better market…
Anonymous

Grade-A Awesome. Joel Vietch and crew are made of flesh and awesome.
kmoser

“Oh my God, it’s full of cards.”
jamiethehutt

No word on if any have been found yet…

They should of attached a dog biscuit to each one, that would of greatly increased the chances of them being found. :-P
buddy66

Why Germany? Bombing Germany just comes natural to English-speaking people.
lewis stoole

a space balloon fell in a forest you say?
did it make a sound?
ebarrett3

Wow, that sounds completely irresponsible. “Hey! Why don’t we dump MOAR tech garbage on the Earth and call it a game?!?” Brilliant.
- Anonymous
  
  Exactly. As Zaphod once said, “Ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking…”
Anonymous

That’s an 8GB memory card at most. What would be the scientific purpose of killing them?
jamiethehutt

No word on if any have been found yet…

They should of attached a dog biscuit to each one, that would of greatly increased the chances of them being found. :-P
presuki

That’s Joel Veitch of rathergood.com fame, he also often shows up in the b3ta newsletter!
hassenpfeffer

Yeahhhhhhh, because ANYONE IN THE WORLD who finds one of these is going to have a device with an SD reader. Plus the fact that, what, 75% of them will fall into an ocean.
- knoxblox
  
  Well, if they have the paper airplane-making skills that I have, rest assured they went into perfect nosedives five seconds after launch, and didn’t make it very far.
- Pantograph
  
  Everyone in Europe does, and launched from 36 km altitude over Germany, I doubt that any of them will reach an ocean.
Anonymous

Hmmm…. I don’t think that this counts as space. Maybe the EDGE of space, but not space. A balloon needs an atmosphere in order to operate and climb. The gas in the balloon needs to be lighter or less dense than the gas surrounding the balloon.

From Dictionary.com
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/space?r=75&src=ref&ch=dic

6. a. the region beyond the earth’s atmosphere containing the other planets of the solar system, stars, galaxies, etc; universe

Yes, I’m nitpicking. Fun project though! A great PR stunt, and I enjoyed the video nonetheless.
oddboyout

I could use a new 8GB SD card…
Joergen Geerds

Totally love the project, anything space related is awesome… but, and that is a big BUT, why the german country side if this is an project for an english audience… Germans aren’t that perfect understanding english instructions… and why pick a day with the most awful (but typical) german weather? the planes just get soaked during their decent…
a_user

They did this to advertise a company, read that as “they would not have done this if someone wasn’t paying them to do it.”

Or to put it another way, they weren’t doing this to celebrate the sheer joy of science, but just a slightly less mundane version of designing and stuffing a leaflet through your letter box. I’ll give them marks for originality but points off for working for the Man.
f sharp a sharp infinity

Man, I cannot believe the sad, snarky nitpicking from some of you people. Is it not good enough to do something cool anymore? Does a wacky idea have to be approved by physicists before you’ll accept it as “valid”. Christ folks, stop hating fun so much. Fun is ok.
cymk

“The planes were released at around 36,500 metres and could have landed anywhere so make sure you watch the skies”

I would be surprised if anyone outside of Germany picks up one of these SD cards.
- MrScience
  
  Given a conservative glide ratio of 5:1 (world record single-sheet paper airplane was 12:1 at sea level; wonder how the GR changes in space), that’s around 2000 kilometers. Given that the radius of coverage would be 1000, approximately the distance from Germany to England, it’s entirely possible one or two would reach London.
PeterK

Samsung should know that there is the risk of serious eye injury and perhaps ear injury as a result of such airplanes. It is hoped that this disrespectful and possibly dangerous activity will be terminated.

http://boingboing.net/2010/12/23/epic-response-to-a-c.html