HALE Mission - Lil' Joe

Well, there's two small problems with this suggestion. First, the mission already happened... in fact, the Lil' Joe payload is right now over in Denmark at a 10th anniversary Mindstorms event at LEGO HQ. 2nd, if you look in my HALE Brickshelf gallery, you'll see there *was* a minifig passenger - I now have several minifigs that have been exposed to near-vacuum at 80k feet :)

did u ocme to the IBM camp and bring the Ogre tank???

No, I didn't but I heard somebody did - any idea who? Pictures or video of the event?

Ah, but the fun was in going up to 80k+ feet :). Read the HALE webpage - essentially what we did was drop it from an "RC" balloon (the drop was commanded from the ground) and Lil' Joe came down... fast!

Either could happen - but during the actual mission, the LEGO pieces did not break (even though Lil' Joe hit the ground at something like 25-30 mph, and Gypsy, my other payload, was supported entirely by the LEGO construction). Some pins started to pull loose, but because of the way the structure was cross-braced, it seems no connections failed in flight - when you use LEGO right, it really holds up (even to -60° C and high impact speeds).

Thanks... and while it didn't all go exactly to plan, I'll call any similar mission where I retrieve a working NXT as "successful"... if not according to plan. The free-fall time depends on what you want to call it. The parachute was deployed at 61 seconds according to the on-board log, but there was no deceleration from it - in other words, even with the parachute out it was "in free fall", so it then becomes a question of what you want to label it as.