Rochester is Passed Up for Lego Space Landing

This article was scraped from Rochester Subway. This is a blog about Rochester history and urbanism has not been published since 2017. The current owners are now publishing link spam which made me want to preserve this history.. The original article was published January 25, 2012 and can be found here.

   Two teens from Toronto, Ontario did the unthinkable a few weeks ago. They launched a Lego man into space and recorded the whole thing! And get this, Rochester     should    have been the Lego man's landing spot...

According to the Toronto Star, Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, age 17, got a crazy idea after seeing video footage from a weather balloon sent into space by MIT students. They decided to try the same stunt themselves just for the fun of the challenge. [     Watch Video of the space flight...

]

With $400 and a four months of free Saturdays, they designed and built a contraption consisting of Styrofoam, a couple of programmable point-and-shoot Canon cameras, a wide-angle video camera, a helium weather balloon, parachute, Super Glue, a GPS-enable cellphone... and one Lego man.

But these two over achievers didn't just want to launch a Lego man into space--their ultimate goal was to retrieve it as well. The pair discovered a website that calculates a weather balloon's estimated landing spot based on input launch coordinates, prevailing winds, and balloon specs -- different weather balloons are designed to burst at different altitudes. The site repeatedly told them their balloon was destined to land in Rochester, N.Y. But Muhammad and Ho didn't like their chances with U.S. Homeland Security. So they waited until the prevailing winds changed direction. Then, when the time was right, they launched their homemade space ship from a soccer field in     Newmarket, Ontario

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After a 97 minute flight, and after snapping scores of     photographs

from 15 miles above Earth, Lego man safely touched down in     Peterborough, Ontario

, avoiding Rochester.

Here's an actual still photo taken by 'Buzz' the Lego-naut...

Oh well. Maybe Rochester will use this as its "Sputnik moment". Do you hear me all you genius RIT engineers?! Rochester will put a Lego man on the moon by 2014, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Said     Lego JFK

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