WATCH: Hobbyist Corry Jensen sends his GoPro 120,000 feet above ground from Kamloops
A video of a B.C. man sending his camera into space is making rounds online.
Cory Jensen launched his camera high into the skies a few miles north of Kamloops last Friday.
“The whole idea to send my camera into space kind of just came out of nowhere,” says Jensen. “I was flipping through some YouTube videos, found a few others that had done it before and figured I can do that.”
So Jensen started planning how to send something that high up into space with even a remote chance of finding it again.
He used his old GoPro camera, which was modified to give it extra battery life and a heat pack to help with the extreme cold at such a high elevation.
Jensen also built his own GPS tracker that would transmit the camera’s location.
His team used an online flight prediction tool that uses weather patterns to predict the path of the balloon, but the landing was not without challenges.
“We actually ended up losing it for an hour while we loaded up to head out on the search, but picked it up again on its way down falling on the parachute,” he says. “The decent was planned to be the same speed as the ride up under the balloon, but the camera was falling more than 20 times faster than we had planned. The balloon had burst, but didn’t tear apart as expected and ended up tangling in the parachute lines.”
Lucky for Jensen and his crew, the parachute did open eventually, but landed pretty hard on top of a mountain about seven kilometers away from the open area they had been aiming for.
They ended up hiking up the mountain with the radio and laptop to find the balloon.
“We almost lost hope until a new location came in and we had found exactly where it had landed,” says Jensen.
The entire flight took about three hours. Jensen says their estimates indicate the camera went as high up as 120,000 feet above ground.
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