will.sweatmanSpace: the final frontier ... for pranking.
When we heard the story of the MIT students who launching a camera into space for only $150, we realized that sending crazy stuff into low orbit was now within anyone's reach. All you need is a weather balloon, a digital videocamera, and enough helium to float Harry Knowles.
Saturn vs. Harry Knowles (to scale)
We enlisted the help of Will "Gigageek" Sweatman, an incredibly talented engineer and fan of ZUG, who helped us come up with the idea as well: to do the first Rickroll in space.
Rickrolling, that indomitable internet in-joke, where you promise someone an irresistible tidbit of information, then redirect them to a video of Rick Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up".
Rickrolling is a prank that seemingly ran its course several years ago, when Rick Astley himself Rickrolled 44 million people during the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade:
Question: how do you outdo that?
Answer: by Rickrolling the entire planet.
We would launch a space balloon which would play the Rick Astley theme to the people of Earth, just like the Vogons warning the planet before they destroyed it at the beginning of The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. If we could put a man on the moon, then surely we could put an 80's pop idol into space.
THE SETUP
Launching Rick Astley into space sounds simple, until you try to do it. Our plan was:
- Launch the balloon, which would travel to the upper reaches of Earth's atmosphere, blaring the dreadful song to the inhabitants of Earth, while taking pictures and video.
- Eventually, the helium would expand so much that the balloon would burst, plummeting back to earth, like Rick Astley's career.
- With luck, a GPS transmitter would relay where it landed, hopefully not in an ocean or prison yard. We expected winds and altitude to land the balloon many miles away from where it launched, which is why we needed to pick our launch site carefully: far away from major cities, highways, or classified military bases.
Building a device that would blast the song, reliable enough to never give us up or let us down, was the biggest challenge.
The MIT students had inspired other hobbyists to launch their own cameras into space, but no one had attempted a two-camera setup with speakers, photos, and video. The entire payload had to weigh less than four pounds to meet FAA regulations, including our GPS transmitter (generously loaned by the good folks at BrickHouse Security). And we somehow had to protect our equipment from an 80,000-foot fall.
We needed a name for our device, so we called it the "Astleyroid."
This isn't NASA, it's NASTLEY.
The Apollo 10 command and lunar modules were named "Charlie Brown" and "Snoopy." Ours were named after two pioneers of online comedy.
One of Will's more brilliant ideas was to add reflector strips. We could still see occasional glints of reflected sunlight long after the balloon was too small to see.
Will also attached a parachute, to slow the Astleyroid's descent as it plummeted to Earth.
Jay prepares to inhale enough helium to talk like a chipmunk for an entire week.
"Honey, I finally found one big enough to fit me."
"I swear, doctor, this tumor was only the size of a grape this morning."
"Let's see that friggin' clown try to make a balloon animal out of THIS thing!"
We then realized with horror that we had unwittingly created Rover from "The Prisoner"
Jay tests the balloon by seeing if it will lift a child into space
Nothing a little branding can't fix.
The triple knot: a knot in the balloon, a knot of rope around the balloon knot, and a knot of tape around the rope knot.
Preparing for launch.
We turned on the speakers, which blared Rick Astley in an endless loop. This quickly got on our nerves so that we just wanted to be rid of the thing. Covering our ears, we counted down and released the rope, knowing we might not ever see the balloon again.
But that wasn't gonna make us cry
We were never gonna say goodbye
We were gonna let it go, you pervert, you.
It was thrilling to watch the balloon lift off. Everyone should launch something silly into space at least once in their lifetime.
This was pretty much the opposite of the sadness you felt when losing a balloon as a child.
See if you can spot the balloon in this picture. (Hint: it's right in the middle.)
The journey into space took about four hours. At some point, the GPS transmitter went out of range, so we stopped for lunch, eagerly refreshing our laptops every thirty seconds to see if it came back online -- meaning the balloon had popped and the Astleyroid had fallen back to Earth.
You can imagine our excitement when the GPS transmitter announced the eagle had landed! It was giving us a signal from a point about an hour away, so we jumped into our cars and sped to the landing site, blasting Culture Club and Duran Duran.
Jay was double-screening it, tracking the GPS coordinates on his laptop and our own coordinates on his iPad.
And I was using my GPS for turn-by-turn directions to locate the famed singer.
We couldn't have been luckier: the Astleyroid fell in a large public forest. As we approached, we could hear the strains of Rick Astley echoing from deep within the trees, like a wood nymph watching VH1.
Success! We found the Astleyroid hanging high in a tree, terrifying woodland creatures with its horrific noise.
After much discussion on how to extricate Rick Astley from his tree, we finally settled on the precisely-engineered solution of a really long stick.
Like rescuing a kitten from a tree, but infinitely more nerdy.
We headed back to Will "Gigageek" Sweatman's truck to download the photos and video.
As we pulled the files onto Will's laptop, our minds swirled with questions. Did the extreme cold of space freeze the electronics? Did the balloon get high enough to take decent pictures? Did sound even travel in space?
Here's what we saw.
The Photos
Preparing to launch.
Liftoff!
700 feet: This is how UFO conspiracies get started.
2,700 feet: This is the kind of photo that should be accompanied by a heavenly choir. Not Rick Astley.
10,000 feet: The Astleyroid breaks through the cloud layer. In chaos theory, this causes a volcano to erupt in Chile three years later.
21,000 feet: This is totally our new Facebook profile photo.
40,000 feet: "Does something smell like burning candles to you?" -- Icarus
63,000 feet: You can begin to see the curvature of the Earth -- proving that the Earth is not flat, but more like a long, slightly curved table
89,000 feet: Note: there are no visible holes in the ozone layer. Another conspiracy debunked.
Occasionally the camera would tilt upward, giving us a view of the inky blackness of space.
Eventually, our balloon popped and the Astleyroid came hurtling down to Earth, still calmly snapping photos.
As it dove camera-first through the cloud layer, water vapor condensed on the lens, leaving the rest of the photos a blurry mess.
Finally, it fell into the high branches of a tree bank, where the camera kept taking pictures until it ran out of storage space. Here's the last photo it took from this amazing journey.
The annals of space history are filled with names like Yuri Gagarin (first man in space), Neil Armstrong (first man on the moon), and Albert II (first monkey in space). Now history must add RICK ASTLEY to this list: the first 1980's pop star in space.
How to Launch Your Own Prank in Space
1) Order a weather balloon large enough to carry some silly item into space, like a co-worker's coffee mug or cherished family photograph. (We ordered a 1000 gram balloon from Scientific Sales to take Rick Astley into space.)
2) Order a digital camera and hack it to take pictures every 30 seconds. We used a Canon A470 with the CHDK software installed. Be sure you have enough storage to take pictures for a four-hour flight.
3) Order a GPS transmitter (not receiver), which will radio its location when it lands, and report on how high it traveled. Thanks to BrickHouse Security for loaning us a Spark Nano GPS, which worked very well; you can see other alternatives at the MIT page.
4) Find a styrofoam beer cooler to stuff the whole thing inside. To test shock absorption, the MIT students put eggs inside their cooler and dropped it off a building; when the eggs were padded enough to stay in one piece, they were ready to launch. In the meantime, they had a lot of omelettes.
5) Weigh the whole mofo to make sure it is under 6 pounds, as regulated by the FAA. (Take pictures as proof.)
6) Rent a helium tank from your local party supply store. Google helium rental and order the largest one they have. Ironically, the helium tank will be incredibly heavy.
7) Find a place to launch, far away from cities, lakes, or UFO enthusiasts. Use the University of Wyoming's excellent Balloon Trajectory Forecast site, which predicts where your balloon will come down based on current weather patterns. It was accurate to within 1/4 of a mile for our launch.
8) You'll also need rope, duct tape, and reflector tape (for the outside of your beer cooler). A parachute wouldn't hurt, either. To find the thing when it lands, you'll need a laptop and a GPS device. Also: beef jerky.
9) Launch! Chew the beef jerky until your GPS reports that your device has landed.
10) Post your project on Hackaday.io
Thanks to our launch team, Will "Gigageek" Sweatman, Jay Stevens, and Isaac Hargrave. We're hoping this pioneering prank inspires other folks to launch their own funny items into space. If you have any, or know of any, please leave us a comment below!