Harvard students send hamburger into space

In an attempt to break the monotony of school, five students send the patty into the stratosphere in a project dubbed Skyfall

Students are well known for their love of fast food, and a group of five friends from Harvard University decided to send one hamburger where no snack has ever gone before. Namely, into space.

Students Renzo Lucioni, Nuseir Yassin, Daniel Broudy, Jamie Law-Smith and Matt Moellman, spent a weekend last month brainstorming ideas for a fun science project to break the monotony of school.

Where no burger has gone before: Students Renzo Lucioni, Nuseir Yassin, Daniel Broudy, Jamie Law-Smith and Matt Moellman spent 30 hours to prepare the launch of the burger into space.

In the end, the Ivy League innovators decided to send a hamburger into space as part of Operation: Skyfall. To accomplish their goal, they contacted Jon Olinto, the co-founder of the local eatery b.good burger.

Olinto jumped on the opportunity to become a restaurant industry space pioneer. Lucioni said he was inspired to launch the burger after reading about MIT students who sent a camera into space via helium balloon in 2009.

It took the group about 30 hours spread over two weekends to prepare the launch, which required gluing the layers of a two-day-old hamburger together, varnishing it, mounting it on an acrylic pedestal, placing it inside a Styrofoam shipping crate and attaching the whole structure to a 600-gram weather balloon filled with helium.

The burger was launched into space from a wooded area of Sturbridge, Massachusetts. It took the balloon carrying the patty meal two hours to reach an altitude of more than 98,000 feet and an hour to plummet back to Earth.

The contraption carrying the trailblazing treat was recovered 130 miles north of Boston using GPS data transmitted by the smartphone.

The balloon landed high up in a 100-foot tree, forcing them to hire a tree climber to retrieve it after a failed attempt to shoot it down with a bow and arrow.

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