Chair floats to final frontier - Cosmic Log - msnbc.com
Texa...@aol.com
Hi All...BIG, BIG "art" project launched from Black Rock Desert!!!!
You could do this too, if you had about $100K....then burn the chairs.
Chair floats to final frontier - Cosmic Log - msnbc.com
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/11/20/2133259.aspx
Chair floats to final frontier
Posted: Friday, November 20, 2009 2:45 PM by Alan Boyle
Toshiba UK
Click for video: An armchair floats to the edge of space in Toshiba's
"Space
Chair Project" commercial. Click on the image to see Toshiba's video on
YouTube.
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Space ballooning hits new heights in an HDTV commercial showing a simple
armchair floating against the backdrop of our curving planet, almost
100,000 feet above the ground. When you watch the video, the first
thought that comes to mind is, "Wow, that's cool!" And the second
thought is probably, "How the heck did they do that?"
"Usually a project like this takes a year or a year and a half to pull
together," John Powell, founder of California-based JP Aerospace and one
of the key guys behind the Space Chair Project, told me. "But they
needed this pulled together in four months."
"They" refers to Toshiba UK and Grey London, the marketing agency that
pulled off the project. The idea was to do something remarkable that
would tout Toshiba's HD cameras and LCD displays as "armchair viewing,
redefined."
JP Aerospace was asked to build a rig that could take the chair and two
miniaturized cameras to the edge of space. Powell and his fellow
high-altitude balloon experimenters had done similar magic tricks in
past years for Discovery Channel and National Geographic Channel
projects. This was ambitious even by JP Aerospace's standards, however.
The job became even more ambitious when the videographers ended up
asking for four separate rigs - essentially, "a backup for a backup for
a backup," Powell said.
He declined to say how much JP Aerospace was paid for the project, but
he noted that the parts alone for each rig cost tens of thousands of
dollars. "This was the only big commercial project we did this year, but
it paid like it was two," Powell said.
The JP Aerospace blog goes into detail about how each rig was
constructed: Basically, the team built frameworks that could be
suspended from the high-altitude balloons. The chair was suspended on
lines from the rig's framework. Powell said each chair weighed just
three and a half pounds because it was built out of balsa wood.
"It was amazing - it looked like a real chair," Powell told me. "Our
biggest worry was that someone would sit on one of them."
The cameras were attached to the rig so that one looked down at the
chair and one got a shot from the front. Adding it all up, each rig
weighed about 22 pounds (10 kilograms).
With all the regulatory approvals in hand, JP Aerospace's team went out
to Nevada's Black Rock Desert and sent up the four rigged-up balloons,
one at a time, over the weekend of Sept. 26-27. Powell joked that the
filmmakers for the commercial and the "making of the commercial" video
clip far outnumbered his balloon-handlers.
Toshiba UK
Click for video: JP Aerospace's team launches a high-altitude balloon
from
Nevada's Black Rock Desert, with chair attached. Click on the image to
watch the
"Making of Space Chair video on YouTube.
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The chairs rose to heights ranging from 82,000 to 99,200 feet, Powell
said. Each flight lasted a little more than two hours: 100 minutes up,
and about 30 minutes down.
Once the balloons got up to their maximum height, the material from
which they were made chilled down to the point that it became as
delicate and brittle as glass. Eventually, of course, the balloons
popped due to the stress, and the rigs started falling through
near-vacuum at speeds faster than Mach 1. As the atmosphere thickened,
the fall slowed. At the end of all four flights, the parachutes opened -
and all the cameras were recovered intact. No backup needed.
"They ended up with about 16 hours of footage for a 60-second
commercial," Powell said.
The video chips were rushed out of the desert to begin the editing
process, and the rest is television (and marketing) history. Toshiba
even set up a promotional Web site to let users guess where the chairs
would land.
Powell said the money earned from the project will be plowed back into
JP Aerospace. In recent years, the near-space imaging business has been
very, very good to Powell and his semi-pro team. "The imagery is what's
really paying the bills. ... We're the only aerospace company to ever be
30 years in the black," he said.
Powell said there's been more interest in high-altitude imagery, due to
a movement away from computer-generated imagery in commercials and
movies. "They could have CGI'd a chair going up there," he said of the
Toshiba filmmakers, "but they wanted the real thing."
High-altitude imaging is also increasingly going low-cost. For example,
there's the MIT student group that recently sent an Earth-imaging camera
almost as high as JP Aerospace's balloons did for just $150. But Powell
said his operation is on a "whole next level," where commercial clients
expect to get total reliability and just the right shot for their needs.
Powell and his colleagues don't expect to limit themselves to
commercials shot at 100,000 feet. Their eventual goal is to develop
airships capable of going all the way to orbit. Right now JP Aerospace
is working on a 35-foot-long Tandem airship that could rise well beyond
the 100,000-foot level. The team is also looking into a "rockoon" launch
system that would use high-altitude platforms as rocket launch pads.
"Each test that we've done is a test for Airship To Orbit," Powell said.
I first mentioned the Airship To Orbit concept more than five years ago,
and since then the effort has weathered its share of ups and downs. Do
you think it's an idea whose time has not yet come, but will someday? Or
is the dream doomed to deflate? Feel free to weigh in with your pros and
cons in the comment section below.
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Texas2SF has shared a video with you on YouTube:
Have you seen this?
a Chair launched into space from Black Rock Desert!
chair in space orbit!
this looks cool!!
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Burning Man is one of my BIG interests!