Sometimes we can really relate to Carl Fredricksen in Up’s desire to strap balloons onto his house and float away to an exotic island. But we never imaged the technology would work.
Good news
for anyone who’d do anything to escape. A group of engineers from the National
Geographic series How Hard Can It Be?
just went to great lengths to prove that Carl’s animated experiment could
actually work.
The gang,
led by series’ Producer Ian White and Executive Producer Ben Bowie, spent two
weeks designing, building and launching a home in the California desert. The
structure was actually a light weight 16 x 16 foot house that weighed about
2,000 pounds.
The night
before lift off, staff gathered in the middle of nowhere and filled 300, eight
feet tall balloons with a tank of helium each. The house not only made it off
the ground, it soared to heights of 10,000 feet. The structure’s unmanned
voyage lasted for about an hour and broke the record for the largest cluster
balloon flight in history.
You’ll have
to wait until the fall when How Hard Can
It Be? premieres on the National Geographic Channel to get all the geeky
scientific details. But if you just want to enjoy a sense of childlike wonder, check
out this video of how it all went down… or should we say, up?
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