Two Seattle girls “were looking for a project to do that was fun” so they launched a homemade craft, a picture of their cat, and a lego Star Wars character more than 70,000ft in the air on Saturday. The craft, called the Loki Lego Launcher, was built entirely by eight-year-old Kimberly Yeung and 10-year-old Rebecca Yeung.
Kimberly, who wants to be a robotic engineer when she grows up, and Rebecca, who hopes to do something involved with science or technology, built the launcher out of wood, a weather balloon, and the shafts of archery arrows. They spent weeks putting it together.
“Our teachers at school are amazing and taught us to explore lots of different things,” the sisters wrote in an email to the Guardian.
Rebecca even said her favorite scientist is a teacher at her school: “Doc O is my science teacher at my school, Seattle Country Day.”
The duo launched their spacecraft after attaching two GoPro cameras, one pointing up and another to the side, to capture footage of the flight. The craft reached an average speed of 35 km/hr and a top speed of 110 km/hr after the balloon popped.
It reached 78,000 ft, 2.5 times the height of Mount Everest and twice as high as commercial aircrafts usually fly. And throughout its flight, the sisters recorded data to help them learn about the layers of the atmosphere.
Rebecca told the Guardian that her favorite part “was launching it and watching it go up”, whereas Kimberly preferred retrieving it after it landed “because we were so happy we actually found it”.
The craft landed about 50 miles from their launch site in Stratford, Washington, according to GeekWire. They chose a launch site in central Washington so that it wouldn’t hit anyone on its descent, “except maybe a cow”, the girls said in a video posted by their father, Winston Yeung.
GeekWire reproduced a “lessons learned” page from their project binder, including notes to use a “bigger balloon”, “don’t stop trying” and “always be optimistic”.
“Have a redundant system,” they advise themselves for next time. “Worry less.”
In it, they attribute their success to good planning. “We were successful because we followed a project plan + project binder,” they wrote.
Overall, they told the Guardian, they were very satisfied with the launch.
“It did go better than we expected, because we thought everything was going wrong when it was actually going right,” they wrote in an email.
Asked what their next big project will be, the girls wrote: “We want to launch another balloon”.
“But first school,” Rebecca added.
