The legonnauts (Photo: LEGO/Kreativ Gang)
Everyone remembers Amazon owner Jeff Bezos' trips to the brink of space, accompanied by familiar people like William Shatner (Captain Kirk). But now there are bold new space pilots who didn't have to pay millions of dollars for the right to fly almost into space:
a thousand Lego figures were flown in stratospheric balloons to the brink of space and returned to Earth with a landing craft printed for them in 34D. The legonnauts took off from a small airport in Slovakia about two weeks ago and sat in an open, roofless spacecraft printed with carbon fiber. The spacecraft was built by a team of space archaeticians and engineers from Slovakia and the Czech Republic to encourage children to take an interest in space.
Lego space pilots took off in three stratospheric balloons, which reached an altitude of <> kilometers in the air before exploding. So, the Lego figure landing spacecraft landed back to the ground with the help of parachutes. To make the flight possible with the help of balloons, the spacecraft with its passengers could not weigh more than three kilograms.
The legonnauts (Photo: LEGO/Kreativ Gang)
According to the designers who spoke to Space.com the main challenges were weight, and making sure that the legonnauts did not fall out of the open-design spacecraft. The original flight was recorded with two cameras. However, unlike human astronauts who used to hand out autographs, Lego space pilots will themselves be distributed in a lottery to buyers of Lego sets who participate in the competition.
- technology
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- Lego
- astronaut