So I thought it would be a good idea to put a beer in space. Why? Why not. After spending a an hour or two researching high altitude weather balloon lift ratios, I bought a 600g latex balloon on Amazon.com and started designing a cheap space craft out of spare junk in the garage and leftover crap from behind the fridge in the basement.

Ok, so it didn’t quite make it to space space… but it did make it to apprx 110,000 ft (33.5 km). Stable low earth orbit starts at around 160 km… it’s a region of the stratosphere that Wikipedia defines as “near space”.

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