14 DAY TRIAL // There’s nothing new about GoPros, they fill the Internet and YouTube with all sorts of shenanigans, crazy deeds and wild stunts, and there’s even a GoPro footage hub where you can watch pretty much every GoPro-filmed content online.
However, there is some kind of footage that not only doesn’t get published often, but when it does, it’s simply due to a funny twist of fate or extreme luck.
Apparently, redditor “trexarmsss,” whose real name is Bryan Chan, and a couple of friends managed to attach a 3D-printed chassis housing a GoPro, a Sony camcorder, and even a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 to a weather balloon. Their plan was to launch the balloon inside the Grand Canyon and track its journey in the higher atmosphere, way over the 100,000-foot limit, and then have the phone text its GPS location when it lands back on Earth, using AT&T’s coverage map.
Unfortunately, when the phone returned to the ground, it landed outside AT&T’s signal area, even if Chan modeled its trajectory inside it, coming down about 50 miles away from the launch point, where there are no roads or any sort of civilization. Therefore, they never got any text message informing them where the device could be, so they considered it lost forever.
Surprisingly, though, two years after the initial launch in 2013, Chan received a call from a woman who worked at AT&T and who said she had found the phone during a hike in the area (surprisingly how an AT&T employee hiked exactly in the area where the mobile device was lost). After identifying his friend’s SIM card, she sent Chan all the footage, including this amazing GoPro shot of space. Enjoy.
