A decade ago, a group of amateur radio enthusiasts picked up on the growing hobby of sending balloons into near space. Recently, they came back with a YouTube sensation. "We posted video of the flight online, and it went viral," says 44-year-old James Ewen, who leads tracking operations for the group. This isn't the first time they've made news: Three years ago, the friends sent a Nikon Coolpix to 117,597 feet, and it came back with photos of the upper atmosphere. That success prompted a mission to launch the next logical piece of electronics, an HD video camera.
So last August, they built a Styrofoam box to house a Canon iVIS HF20 camcorder. They outfitted the box with an APRS tracker, a GPS receiver and 10 lithium batteries. After clearance from Canada's civil aviation authority, the group launched its balloon from an Edmonton-area park; the payload touched down 89 miles away. The balloon burst at 107,145 feet, 21,234 feet shy of the record, but the camera captured some of the first amateur HD video of the arc of the Earth. In the future, the group plans to include an RC plane to its balloon payload and fly the camera home.