First Rickroll in Space, Part 2 A comedy article
by John Hargrave 128,751 73 09/27/2010 05:47 PM 14042 views
We were launching the first Rickroll in space [read Part 1 here], and our massive weather balloon was now on its way up, lifting our "Astleyroid" to broadcast bad 80's music to the entire Western hemisphere, not to mention any passing satellites.
The Launch
It was thrilling to watch the balloon lift off. Everyone should launch something silly into space at least once in their lifetime.
This was pretty much the opposite of the sadness you felt when losing a balloon as a child.
See if you can spot the balloon in this picture. (Hint: it's right in the middle.)
The journey into space took about four hours. At some point, the GPS transmitter went out of range, so we stopped for lunch, eagerly refreshing our laptops every thirty seconds to see if it came back online -- meaning the balloon had popped and the Astleyroid had fallen back to Earth.
You can imagine our excitement when the GPS transmitter announced the eagle had landed! It was giving us a signal from a point about an hour away, so we jumped into our cars and sped to the landing site, blasting Culture Club and Duran Duran.
Jay was double-screening it, tracking the GPS coordinates on his laptop and our own coordinates on his iPad.
And I was using my GPS for turn-by-turn directions to locate the famed singer.
We couldn't have been luckier: the Astleyroid fell in a large public forest. As we approached, we could hear the strains of Rick Astley echoing from deep within the trees, like a wood nymph watching VH1.
Success! We found the Astleyroid hanging high in a tree, terrifying woodland creatures with its horrific noise.
After much discussion on how to extricate Rick Astley from his tree, we finally settled on the precisely-engineered solution of a really long stick.
Like rescuing a kitten from a tree, but infinitely more nerdy.
We headed back to Will "Gigageek" Sweatman's truck to download the photos and video.
As we pulled the files onto Will's laptop, our minds swirled with questions. Did the extreme cold of space freeze the electronics? Did the balloon get high enough to take decent pictures? Did sound even travel in space?
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