MIT Students Take Pictures from 93,000 ft on $150 Budget.

These are the kinds of things that make me want to attend MIT. You can easily market these things if you made them user-friendly. Maybe even put a steering mechanism on them?

This is pretty cool. Something similar was done about a year or so ago by some secondary school students in Spain.

Also, there is a cool video floating around somewhere (can't find the link right now) of how to build your own balloon based satellite that incorporates off the shelf cameras and a computer. I think it was a make magazine project.

It's a bit of a stretch to call 20 miles up "space".

Last spring: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5005... ...which made news at the time because of the extreme low cost, off-the-shelf hardware and so on.

Yeh stressed the groundbreaking nature of their work. “The fact that we were able to accomplish space photography on such a low budget and with minimal electronic modifications proves that it’s really possible for anyone—anyone at all—to do. Imagine how many students might be inspired if their high school science teacher took the time to give his students an out-of-this-world experience.”

...or indeed, vice versa. I can't help noticing that the reports of European high schoolers correlate strongly with the time that Mr Lee stopped posting on his short-lived cancer-reporting blog, correlatingcancer.com, which is the host for 1337arts.com.

Well, at least Mssrs Lee & Yeh have a superior understanding of marketing and self-promotion.

They aren't the first to do something like this.

Here's a very similar project made in 2007:

http://www.natrium42.com/halo/flight2/