This article was originally written by Lauren Beavis for SWNS — the U.K.’s largest independent news agency, providing globally relevant original, verified, and engaging content to the world’s leading media outlets.
One small step for man is one giant leap for a Lego man, and while no astronauts have stepped foot on the moon recently, one plastic figurine did just take a trip to the cosmos.
On Wednesday, June 18, staff and students at Gobowen Primary School in Shropshire, England, launched a weather balloon carrying Dan the Lego man and a small camera into the stratosphere to measure temperature, wind, relative humidity, and pressure.
After losing contact with the balloon shortly after it went up, the school team was delighted to see their tracker come back online the following day, revealing that the balloon had landed in a quarry in Newark, Nottinghamshire.
Data revealed it had reached a staggering negative 54 degrees Celsius — which suggested the balloon traveled “well over 30,000 feet, maybe reaching in the region of 70,000 feet.”
Margaret Cameron, a fourth grade teacher at the school, explained how the project came to fruition, sharing that a student had pitched the idea two years ago after seeing videos online of weather balloons being launched.
“I told him that we would have to put together a proposal to our headteacher for this kind of huge project, as the money it would cost for the equipment alone may mean it would be a no,” she recalled to SWNS. “We got our plan together and took it to our headteacher, Mr. Walsh, who to mine and Daniel’s [the child who initiated the idea] surprise said yes.”
From there, Cameron researched what was required, and then placed an order for the materials from a German company called Stratoflights.
“I went to collect the equipment, and pay the import tax, and then opened a box of very complicated equipment,” she shared. “It seemed a lot more research was needed! Eventually, with lots of help, the equipment was sorted, all instructions had been read, and permissions had been granted from Shropshire Council to launch from our school grounds,” Cameron said.
She continued: “Insurances were also in place to cover any eventualities, and permission had been requested from the CAA (Civil Aviation Authority). We had our very own Lego man made to go on this journey with our weather balloon and he was good to go on his adventure,”
It was 2023, and the team had planned their launch event and invited parents to attend, but unfortunately they had to cancel as they did not get aviation permission in time. A second attempt was planned, but that one was foiled by the weather.
Finally, two years after the initial idea, in the final term before Daniel was set to depart Gobowen Primary School for secondary school, the team decided to make their third attempt.
“This time, everything was perfect,” Cameron shared. “The permission was granted, the weather was good, and we had plenty of helium, donated by Lindstrand Industries. The flight path and predicted landing zone and time had been calculated using the Stratoflight online tool.”
The weather balloon was set to launch at 11 a.m. local time, travel to 30,000 feet, and land the same day at 2:30 p.m. in Derbyshire.
The whole school headed up to its playing fields for the event and waited as Cameron and another teacher laid out the weather balloon and began filling it with helium.
“We had to measure the neck-lift of the balloon [to get the correct amount of helium] with weights from our math cupboard wrapped into a carrier bag!” she said. At last, it was launched. In what appeared to be a total success, the balloon soared into the sky as the entire school community cheered.
However, shortly after Walsh and Cameron set off to collect the balloon, they realized that their tracking devices had failed. “We searched the predicted landing zone but to no avail and headed back to let nearly 200 children know that the weather balloon had been lost,” she explained. “That Thursday morning we had some very sad children asking lots of questions that we couldn’t answer.”
Then, on Thursday afternoon — when it “seemed that all hope was lost” — the tracking device suddenly “pinged” back into action: The weather balloon, and Dan the Lego man, had landed in a quarry in Newark.
“Our hope was restored,” said Cameron. The team made a call to the quarry, and their still intact equipment was recovered by the site manager.
“By Monday [June 23] we had our equipment and Lego man back in school,” she recounted. Though the camera recorded an “amazing adventure from start to finish,” the data logger had unfortunately failed, leaving the students and teachers with few clues to why their Lego man’s journey didn’t go as expected.
Still, the adventure has given students, staff, and the rest of the community a “real buzz.”
Cameron said the key message for everyone is to encourage children to “dream big”: “For that one child, he dared to dream and he asked and thought we would do it and support him. It’s so important — the curriculum is set by the government, but when children’s ideas are listened to and acted on — it makes such a difference to their whole school experience.”
She added: “Everyone has been so excited, and all the children and the staff will remember it forever!”
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