Name: We Sent Garlic Bread to the Edge of Space, Then Ate It
Uploaded: 2018-04-27T06:52:06.000Z
Duration: 5 min 24 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

We're sending garlic bread to the edge of space!

Loads of people have launched loads of objects on balloons,

But despite a lot of breathless press releases

those objects haven't been launched into space.

Most standards organisations agree that space officially starts

at the completely arbitrary Kármán Line, 100 kilometres up.

And balloons like that one only get about a third of the way there.

And we're definitely not sending anything into orbit.

Orbit requires tens of thousands of miles-an-hour of speed.

We're going as high as we can with this payload.

It gets warmer as you approach that sort of altitude.

So it's coldest just above the jet stream

It gets back down to about zero about where the balloon will pop.

The idea that all those publicity stunts actually made it to space

is helped by the fact that the fish-eye lens on some of the cameras that they use

means that the curve of the earth looks a lot more dramatic

Now we're using cameras that correct for that,

so what you'll see on screen is more or less what you'd see up there.

So we're not saying "space", we're saying "the edge of space".

Which is basically just a marketing term, but the atmosphere's so thin up there,

about 1% of the pressure at ground level, that it's close enough.

and because someone already sent pizza up in a balloon a few years ago.

It's homemade. Well, apart from the baguette.

I did some homemade garlic butter on there with some real nice Parmesan on it.

Although I did make it at 5 o'clock this morning!

It's going to be possibly frozen. I mean...

We're going to send half up in the sky with the balloon

and then leave half on earth for a real comparison taste test.

As it goes up, the atmosphere is getting thinner and thinner

and there's less and less air pushing in.

The balloon itself will get bigger and bigger.

and the equipment will parachute down to the ground

We normally predict the landing spot to within about five miles

We're tracking the balloon using some radio trackers.

They send a signal with a GPS position to the ground

and that's put on a map and we chase the balloon's predicted landing spot.

I've done lots of high-altitude ballooning.

I've been doing it now for about 10 years.

Never lost one. Sent one to its doom a couple of times.

All sorts of food items have been launched into the stratosphere.

The BBC sent wedding cake up as part of a children's show

but the punchline at the end was that no one actually ate it.

I've yet to find any balloon-launched food that was actually eaten after landing.

And the main reason for that is you have no idea

where it's going to land, what it's going land in,

or what animals will have got to it first.

The box I've designed has a GPS and a little servo,

As it comes down it closes the servo 1000 metres above the ground.

So now we have to get in our cars and go chasing the payload.

It's just coming in to land somewhere about half a mile ahead

Well, at least we've got two cameras, I suppose.

So that one ripped; that one went [tearing sound].

I don't know. I mean... - That has been frozen.

You can sorta see the colour of the middle of them.

This went to the stratosphere and I'm eating it!

Thank you very much to Steve Randall from Random Aerospace

and to Barry Lewis from My Virgin Kitchen.

I don't actually know what I did on this.