A young Cypress man went above and beyond the earth’s atmosphere to capture stunning video.
The video shot from 105,000′ above earth, captures the curvature of the earth with the blazing sun in the distance. The stunning views rival those captured by NASA; however, they are courtesy of a 20-year-old Cypress man named Alex Yovanovic, a giant balloon and his 2-year coin collection.
Yovanovic is a mechanical engineering student at Texas Tech and since 2013 had been trying to send a camera to the upper stratosphere.
The tools he used were pretty simple; a giant helium balloon, GoPro cameras, a GPS tracking system and a parachute to get everything back to earth. The science behind it all was pretty technical though.
“My college classes actually helped me out a lot with my second third times around because of thermodynamics,” Yovanovic explained. “Things like temperature and pressure correlation.”
The first two balloons never made it but he didn’t give up. In March, Yovanovic decided to try for a third time.
“I had a really big coin jar that I had been saving for about two years! We took that to a little store in Lubbock to get some cash to pay for the helium.”
Yovanovic launched the third balloon from Lubbock. For hours he kept his eyes on the GPS pings to track his balloon. After three hours he discovered it has landed in a cotton field 70 miles south of Lubbock. He wouldn’t learn that the launch was a success until later, when he plugged the cameras into a television and watched.
“It was amazing! We all just watched the TV and everyone was just like, ‘Alex this is cool’. It’s an amazing sight to see all that up there. We were all just in awe of what the cameras captured. It was just an overwhelming feeling of, ‘I did this. I can say I did this… I did everything’.”
Yovanovic will be starting his junior year at Texas Tech in the fall. He hopes to work in the space industry someday.
(Information provided by KHOU.com)
