It took this crew the short span of two weeks to “fly the house” in this National Geographic project to create a real life version of the house in Pixar’s Up– lifted into the sky by balloons. “The real Up! Scientists recreate floating house from Pixar movie… and prove it really CAN fly” at dailymail:

The team from National Geographic have built a house inspired by the Pixar movie Up! that can really fly.

Using 300 helium-filled weather balloons, a team of scientists, engineers, two balloon pilots and dozens of volunteers, they managed to get the small house 10,000 feet into the air.

Of course it was not a real house, but a custom-built light weight one.

Executive producer Ben Bowie said: ‘We found that it is actually close to impossible to fly a real house.’

Producer Ian White added: ‘But what we can do is kind of fly a light-weight house and fly it safely with people on board.’


[via designboom]

BY Becky Stern

Becky Stern is head of wearable electronics at Adafruit Industries. Her personal site: sternlab.org

7 Responses to Real Life "Up" House Lifted by Balloons

  1. I had a long comment typed in, but it wasn’t nice… I’ll just summarize instead.

    What a waste.

  2. Anonymous on said:

    Isn’t there a global shortage of helium?

  3. Did they take it back down? How?

  4. I love it, so whimsical, I so wish I had been there.

  5. This is a very interesting thing, but I want to know how you got down it back?

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