The Master Plan

You may ask, how will this project work?  Well, here's the basics:  Start with a commercial-grade weather balloon...  not something for a birthday from Party City or the local toy store, this is a serious balloon that carries scientific equipment.  Once we get ourselves one of those, we're going to hook it up to a payload: a rugged-but-light container (a.k.a. foam beer cooler) that will carry our cameras and gear.  A parachute will be attached between the balloon and payload.  Now, we fill the balloon with enough helium to get the lift strength we need to get to a certain altitude. The balloon will be lifted up, and if we have enough helium and a light enough payload, it should get to about 90,000 to 100,000 feet, the top of the atmosphere, with the cameras taking video the whole time.

This is roughly what the project will look like in action

Well, that's cool and all, but how is it going to come down?  If we have enough helium in the balloon, and it gets to the above-mentioned height, it's reaching the point where there's basically no atmosphere left... so, do you remember your high school physics?  Balloon filled with gas, rising and reaching decreasing atmosphere (pressure) outside the balloon = balloon expands until... "BOOM"...  balloon bursts, payload and parachute start falling back to earth, parachute opens when there's enough air under it, and... the whole contraption (minus the balloon that graciously gave its life for our project) falls gently back to earth. Hopefully. This whole flight, from launch to landing, should be about 2-3 hours.

Then what?  Well, we go find it.  Fast. There's a bunch of cool cameras and gadgets in there, which people may like and decide to keep (assuming the payload has not become a flattened pile of foam and expensive electronics).  Our sponsors are counting on us to recover and publish some awesome footage of the upper atmosphere and space, and if the cameras they paid for are missing, then we will have hell to pay.

So, we will track it with the on-board GPS, and try to stay roughly under where it is during the flight (courtesy of the PocketFinder, which will broadcast its location until it reaches the far reaches of the atmosphere, and then resume its broadcasts on the way back down).  Hopefully, this will lead us to its eventual landing site.

Assuming everything else goes as planned, the "where" factor of the landing is the big worry.  It could land in water, high up in a tree, on the roof of a shopping mall, in the courtyard of a maximum security prison, in restricted secret government areas, on top of a mountain, or in many other places difficult or inadvisable to get to.  We have to pray and hope the wind brings it down in a nice field of grass a few yards from a quiet, isolated country road, or at least somewhere we can get to it without rappelling gear and assault weapons.

So IF it went up and flew over terrestrial obstacles, IF the cameras and gear worked properly at high altitudes and extreme cold temperatures, IF it gets to burst altitude rather than just hovering for days and traveling around the planet a few times, IF the parachute opens properly on descent, IF it lands safely and relatively softly, and IF said location is somewhere accessible, IF we get to it before someone else finds it, and IF the cameras have substantive footage, then we're going to have one kick-ass video from SPACE. What could possibly go wrong?