If you thought Lego was just a boring building toy, the derring do of a couple 17-year-olds from Scarborough may make you think twice.
Unlike a lot of teens, Mathew Ho nor Asad Muhammad weren't preoccupied with partying or girls. And also unlike this teen, they couldn't afford the ticket. So they spent every Saturday of the past four months devising a science project of their own that would give them a taste of space.
Ho and Muhammad, who respectively share interests in engineering and aerospace, thought it would be fun to launch a homemade balloon carrying a Lego passenger and four cameras into space.
The whole thing took 97 minutes but provided some astonishing footage from an estimated 24 kilometres above sea level. According to the Star's report—that's "three times the typical cruising altitude of a commercial aircraft."
Take that, Armstrong. The little Lego spaceman even carried a miniature Canadian flag.
“We didn’t really believe we could do it until we did,” says Ho of the project which cost $400 to complete. A project which University of Toronto astrophysics professor Dr. Michael Reid claimed showed "a tremendous degree of resourcefulness,” the kind usually undertaken by PhD students.
The future is no doubt bright for Ho and Muhammad who became friends in middle school, and have applied to university programs in commerce and engineering, respectively.
“People would walk into the house and see us building this fantastical thing with a parachute from scratch, and they would be like, ‘What are you doing?,” says Ho. “We’d be like, ‘We’re sending cameras to space.’ They’d be like, ‘Oh, okayyyyy….’”
See, kids, what else you can do with your iPhone...
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