#203 – Fold
Posted on September 26, 2012 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comic
I’ve seen lots of videos in the past year or so of people sending weather balloons up into the stratosphere with a video camera attached. The most recent was this one that included Stanley the train. I want to do one that drops a payload of a hundred paper airplanes from 60,000 feet. Each plane would have a tracking code and then a website to go to and report where you found the plane.
Tags: astronaut, paper airplane, space
The release of Mass Effect 3 had something similar. http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/02/16/early-copies-of-mass-effect-3-launched-into-space
You mean it wasn’t because of people unhappy with the ending?
Someone in Europe recently did a edge of space Paper Plane drop. The planes each had a SD card, with relevant documents loaded. I’d like to see you do one here in the States, with special-printed paper planes with this cartoon on them, and SD cards loaded with the tracking codes, web links, and several Biff panels. In fact, it would be a good chance to use at least three different designs for the planes, just to see which ones travel the farthest.
Here is the link to it-looks very cool! but yes, i think different designed planes to see which got the furthest is a great idea! 🙂
Wow cool!
The sad part is that I know you’d have to be able to throw a paper airplane almost 30 km/s to hit the sun from the distance that earth is from it. That’s ignoring solar wind and such – just accounting for the orbital velocity of such a trajectory.
Besides the necessary speed, you’re throwing the airplane in the wrong direction. You need to throw it against the direction of orbit. Throwing it towards the sun would just give it a more eccentric orbit.
In response to the two previous comments: I had presumed that the spaceship he traveled in had already ceased all orbital velocity before the throw, so the orbit wouldn’t be an issue.
Not sure about the solar wind; though maybe he could put a really really really heavy paperclip on the front.
If so, what keeps the ship (and astronaut) from falling down? And by “down”, i mean up, right into the sun.
… just so I can watch it die.