GoProHD in Spaaaaaaaaace!!!

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I love the GoproHD, great little HD sports cameras that you can stick anywhere. I have stuck them on cars, on my head and more interestingly inside P40 fighters for Lucasfilm to capture reference future that ILM could use to watch how light reflected, that was for the movie I worked on called “Red Tails” but this is bloody brilliant…

Some guys stuck the little GoPro HD on a weather balloon…here is what they said on Vimeo: “We are a group of engineers/designers from San Francisco. This was our second balloon launch on 6/5/2010. Shot with 2 HD Hero cameras from GoPro. Launched from the California coast near Davenport, landed in Crows Landing 70 miles away. Peak altitude 80,000 feet. Acquired GPS, pressure, accelerometer, and temperature data with a Shadowbox (www.shadowboxlive.com). The payload was tracked with a SPOT satellite personal tracker.”

This really shows just how bloody good the GoProHD is and how bloody rugged too!

Enjoy this footage, it’s brilliant! Thanks to DV Culture for the great pic at top of post!!

Near Space Balloon Flight, shot with HD HERO cameras from GoPro from Kevin Macko on Vimeo.

Balloon flight, shot with an HD HERO camera from GoPro. from Francois Brahic on Vimeo.

25 comments

  1. The pop of the balloon and the ‘journey back to earth’ are crazy… the fact that the GoPro survives is amazing!

    Now all we need to do is start fund raising for the ‘Mr Bloom in Space’ Project – imagine the time lapse footage as the 5Dmkii clicks away… HDSLR in the upper atmosphere – LOL 😉

    Agree on the footage – watched it a couple of times, reminds me of the old (Nasa?) educational movie from the 70’s (I think) that was a journey from a garden and then zoomed out into space (or maybe vice-versa)…

    Anyway – you’re right – sooo cool 🙂

  2. This is pretty amazing. But is it the lawyer in me (I’m a criminal defense and entertainment attorney) when I ask about what would have happened if the camera had fallen on someone?

    I guess they had some kind of parachute or something. I’m pretty ignorant of these things.

    But had the camera fallen and hurt someone or caused and accident, I doubt that GoPro would have wanted to have been attached to the project.

    Still, I gotta get one of these little cameras!

  4. I actually don’t think there was any parachutes. It does however have wings. You can see the shadows of the rig they built and there wasn’t any parachutes. Pretty talented! =)

    1. def was a parachute…this from the guys who did it: Yeah, we had no damage to any of the equipment. The styrofoam capsule didn’t even have any cracks, so I would say the parachute did its job 🙂

      We did check the wind patterns ahead of time and it landed within ~10 miles of where we predicted. We definitely didn’t want it landing in water or the mountains, and we got lucky that it landed so close to a road on a farm without a fence!

  7. To do this is cheaper than many people here might think. The most expensive part would be the two gopro cameras.
    The easy way would be to send a simple compact camera into space (firmware hack to make photos every couple seconds). Even a total loss of the equipment would only cost you around 150$.

    These guys here made a very detailed guide http://space.1337arts.com/

  9. Amazing shots.

    You know what – actually the British won the space race. The problem is, they could only afford a Canon compact!!

    Earlier this year a guy used one of these near-space balloons to take a Canon compact camera up in a capsule which did a timelapse of stills and the odd crap video! Put the first video DSLR in space and it’d look even better.

    Here’s how he did it…
    http://www.eoshd.com/content/129-Sending-the-GH1-into-space-for-500

    And he used a parachute, with permission from UK aviation authority to launch.

  12. MadMonkFish – I thought it was understood around here not to promote timelapses around Philip. It hurts his recovery of this addiction! 🙂

    Thanks for sharing PB – great stuff as always.

    1. Dave S – whoops – sorry, I forgot! But imagine if we could raise the funds for a ‘Philip’ size balloon (plus maybe an atmosphere suit – we would want him to survive up there!) then PB can promote upper atmosphere HDSLR 🙂 We could even try and ban him using timelapses on his epic journey into the unknown 😉

      Agree on PB’s share – always my first place to check for cool stuff and relevant news.

  16. What a miraculous little camera. I have two now, using them on the
    gulf coast documentary. Clamped and cupped onto everything imaginable, underwater, in blowing sand, no problem, they never fail. You turned me on to them in your first mention on your blog. I owe you, again. Thanks.
    Cheers.

  17. There is liability no matter what. My dad is in aviation and I’ll ask him about the weather balloon thing. I watched the vid again and thought those were shots of the parachute.

    At my wedding last weekend, we had a few balloons get away at the hangar where were were having a party. I mentioned this to my pilot cousin and he laughed saying balloons wouldn’t hurt the planes. However, wouldn’t a weather balloon be a little more substantial?

    And has anyone wiki’ed them balloons? Do they still use them for weather studies?

    It is a totally cool thing. Off topic, anyone using one of these cameras on their DSLR rig? Seems like they are small enough to just stick on the rig as a backup. I’ve done this with my Kodak zi8 but the GoPro is much smaller.

    And my girl is just buzzing about this Swiss win! If I mention the World Cup will it crash Bloom’s blog?

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