New Canaan’s Henry Benton and Peter Vigano together made a compressed gas Ping Pong ball launcher when they were in the third grade.
Henry Benton and Peter Vigano in their STEM Room at Saxe Middle School on March 17, two days before launch. Credit: Michael Dinan
As fourth-graders, the classmates created a computer game and as fifth-graders, a camera. Last year, as a sixth-grader, Henry built a computer.
Then one day last summer he had an epiphany while watching a science TV show “where they were testing the durability of action cameras,” Henry recalled Thursday afternoon from a STEM room at Saxe Middle School during an Open Lab period, his pal Peter standing nearby and the pair of them wearing new, matching shirts.
“There was one story where the action camera fell when someone was skydiving and I thought, ‘Why not a weather balloon if they’re that durable? We could put some of those on a weather balloon.’ ”
Well, sure.
On Friday, thanks to a locally supported Kickstarter campaign titled “Balloon to the Edge of Space: See the Stars” (see video above) that’s garnered $1,582 since December, the boys will fly to Dallas with their dads and launch a weather balloon into space, more than 100,000 feet. The 600-gram balloon will be outfitted with cameras, parachutes, pressure censors and a GPS device, among other items, and the boys hope that when it lands in a Crowell, Texas ranch, they will have digital video footage that makes visible the curvature of planet Earth.
“The goal was to see if we could use materials available to us in order to build a functioning weather balloon that could gather some stuff that we would not normally have access to, such as pictures from outer space, height, pressure, temperature,” Peter, 12, explained with the matter-of-fact familiarity that fellow Saxe seventh-graders might reserve for NCAA basketball tournament predictions.
In other corners of this STEM room at the middle school, a boy is on a flight simulator while another is working on creating a very small computer and a pair of girls are creating a desalinization machine that’s designed to be less expensive for people who live in places where they need to desalinate the water.
“They’re using solar panels, so they don’t have to use electricity,” STEM teacher Vivian Birdsall said, then lowered her voice, adding, “And they’re 10.”
The projects will be featured next month during Tech Night at New Canaan High School, said Birdsall (yes, a distant relation). That’s when kid throughout the district highlight what they’re doing with technology, she said.
Open Lab operates similarly to its predecessor, the Tech Club, Birdsall said, where kids can come in and pursue their ideas. Two years ago, the Board of Education decided to formalize Birdsall’s 8-year-old Tech Club into what is now her STEM Room where she works full-time with a full STEM curriculum (Tech Club still operates and Henry is the head of it).
Henry and Peter—sporting special-made “I Have Been To Space” shirts (their dads have them, too, the boys said) have a very good idea of what should happen with their weather balloon. It’s made of latex and the entire contraption weighs less than four pounds, so that they’re under a size limit that otherwise would concern the FAA with respect to, say, possible passing commercial airliners.
“The balloon will pop and be shredded, so we’re not going to get that back but we hope to recover the payload,” Henry said.
They’re tying a special knot for the parachutes so that they’re activated by the pressure of wind on descent, and if they can “hit the atmospheric wind patterns,” Henry explained, the cameras should come down, affixed to their frame, in about three or four hours.
“We are going to have data that has in the past been not easily accessible and most people just think it’s very difficult,” Henry said.
Asked what their next project might be, Henry said: “I want to build maybe like a car or something. It’s one of those things where it hits you, and you know that’s it.”
This is SO cool and exciting. Thanks Michael for sharing their inspiring story. Can’t wait for the post launch sequel.