A NASA team plans to launch a figured of a character from The Lego Movie into space next Thursday morning.
The team plans to launch Benny, a character in The Lego Movie who is absolutely obsessed with spaceships, into space. They provided The Daily Caller News Foundation with images of Benny’s launch prep and supervision of the work. The team is associated with Old Dominion University (ODU).
“Benny will hit an apogee of between 115 and 130km up, above the Karman line and thus in space,” Cian Branco, a mechanical expert for the university’s payload, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “He’s riding aboard ODU’s RockSat-C payload which will, among other things, attempt to certify the Space Communications ground station at ODU by broadcasting a signal some 170 odd km from Space above Wallops to Norfolk, Virginia.”
The launch will take data from a prototype solar cell, packetize it with a cell phone, and broadcasting it from the in-flight rocket to the university. This system test will qualify the ground station at ODU for space communication.
(Courtesy of Cian Branco)
The project is part of a yearly program that NASA hosts which provides cheap access to space for experiments for college students. The cost for the university was about $5,500 to fly 5 pounds into space. This is cheap relative to the typical costs of lifting an object into space.
(Courtesy of Cian Branco)
The rocket will be launched on a Terrier-Improved Orion booster rocket from NASA’s from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
(Courtesy of Cian Branco)
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