there with the curvature of the Earth.”

Dolls rise to 94,000 feet

The APSU High-Altitude Balloon team members secured two dolls – dressed in American Girl doll NASA space suit provided by the College of STEAM – to the balloon payload. They affixed two GoPro cameras to the load to capture the dolls at the edge of space.

American Girl and NASA designed the suit for the company’s 2018 girl of the year, Luciana Vega, a doll whose storyline includes the “creativity, confidence and a serious science streak” to reach for the stars with a dream of landing on Mars.

The team launched the balloon at 9:52 a.m. Jan. 24 from the Austin Peay Farm and Environmental Education Center on Pickens Road in Clarksville. The balloon rose steadily at 5-9 meters persecond (11-20 mph) and drifted northeast over Port Royal and Adams, Tennessee, before crossing into Kentucky and over Adairville, Franklin and Glasgow.

The balloon popped at almost 94,000 feet (almost 18 miles up) at 11:13 a.m.

Austin Peay State University and the College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics celebrated women in STEM by launching a high-altitude balloon on Jan. 24, 2019.(Photo11: Taylor Slifko/Contributed, APSU)

A parachute carried the payload back to the Earth at about the same speed it went up, and the dolls landed without damage in a field about 115 miles away near Edmonton, Kentucky, at 11:45 a.m. A recovery team tracked the landing using GPS data and Google satellite photos, retrieving the dolls at 2:32 p.m. (after stopping for lunch in Bowling Green, Kentucky).

Balloon recovery, sometimes from