In 2013, a group of friends launched a weather balloon a few miles out of Tuba City Arizona, attached to the weather balloon was a 3D printed casing and a GoPro. After climbing upward for 87 minutes, the weather balloons burst sending the camera down to earth as planned. The crew was supposed to then go ahead and retrieve the camera when it fell and check out the video. The crew however was unable to find the camera upon landing and eventually gave up. Two years later, a hiker found the rubble. Bryan Chan who launched the camera explained on Reddit: “The whole project took myself and four friends a couple months of planning. We almost canceled the whole thing because helium cost 4x more than we were budgeting. As for the communications and attempted recovery (warning, about to get technical): We used GPS on a smartphone to continuously log the phone’s location on its memory card. The standard GPS receiver these days can track your phone well above 100,000 ft – there used to be a limitation of 60,000 ft but that was recently lifted. The harder issue was to figure out how the phone can communicate to us. [...]