In June 2014, 5 friends made the decision to go out into the Arizona desert and record footage of outer space with a GoPro recorder attached to a weather balloon. They launched it into the sky, and for 2 long years they didn’t hear from it: until it finally returned, with impeccable, citizen recorded shots of Earth from outer space.
Some college students and their peers received permission from the US FAA to launch a balloon with a GoPro Hero2 Sony camcorder and Samsung Galaxy Note II smartphone, with the phone taking photos and the two cameras recording video footage.
Ashish Goel, Bryan Chan, Ved Chirayath, Tyler Reid and Paul Tarantino decided to launch the weather balloon a few miles from Tuba City, Arizona far out in the desert, and this is the video they eventually produced.
The group’s original plan was to track the motion of their balloon through GPS on a smartphone. The plan was ditched after they lost contact with the device’s location, being out of range of a cell phone tower. Miraculously, two years later a hiker out in rural Arizona had come across a strange box.