Hamburger in Space

Hamburger in Space

A team of five Harvard students sent a hamburger into space late last month, calling their stunt “Operation Skyfall.”

The hamburger was purchased from B.good, a local restaurant. It was left to age to firm up for a few days and then covered with a layer of spray-on varnish to better withstand winds on its journey through the upper atmosphere.

The sandwich was mounted onto an apparatus with a GoPro camera and a GPS, which was then attached to a helium ballon, according to the video’s YouTube description. As seen in the video, the hamburger rose to an altitude of 30,000 meters (about 98,425 feet) before the balloon popped and sent it and its rigging spiraling dramatically downward. That height is technically not entering the standard definition of space, but reaching the stratosphere, which is still damn high and makes for an awesome video. It is oddly beautiful.

The team recovered the camera days later in some woods north of Boston, about 130 miles from its launch site in Sturbridge, Mass. The rig landed in a tree, and the team tried unsuccessfully to shoot it down with a bow and arrow. Eventually, a storm knocked the camera out of the tree, and the video was recovered.