This is our unmanned mission to the outskirts of space. It's pretty basic, but got the job done with a bit of common sense and the application of technology. The capsule was simply sandwiched layers of polystyrene with small cavities in the middle for the delicate and highly scientific equipment sourced off ebay. The actual guts of the capsule was an old (pink) mobile phone with some custom firmware which would report back GPS coordinates every few minutes to a remote webserver, and a high res handheld video recorder. A latex weather balloon and tank of helium provided the lift, and a small parachute set of open when the balloon burst provided the air resistance on the way back down. Of great surprise to everyone, all of this worked perfectly.

We launched early one morning, somewhat hungover. We imagine the Apollo 11 mission was done just like this, slightly groggy and carting a half filled milk bottle about. The milk bottle determined the weight of helium we wanted to fill our balloon with, the amount of helium we wanted would lift the weight of the capsule, attachments, and the milk bottle.

The actual flight went off without a hitch. Our camera in the capsule would fail if it ran out of battery before it ran out of space on the memory card, so we made sure to have a card small enough to fill up within the time frame of the flight. There is actually a full video of the flight, but it's quite large.

A successful recovery! Landed slightly off course, but only by 10 miles or so and well within our recovery range (all of East Anglia). Our recovery expert was dictated by clothing as it landed in a field of nettles and he was the only one wearing trousers.