Here I spent my senior year of high school beating on guitars and pretending that I had a chance of becoming a rock star, while these two kids from Toronto spent their weekends trying to figure out how to put a Lego man into space!
Well, 85,000 feet is still a long way…
I don’t care if it’s been done before – this is a really cool science project for a couple of kids to undertake … not only considering the lift and drop physics, but also factoring in weather, protecting their cameras from shock and the elements, foreign politics for realizing that they’d best not launch it when it might land over the US border for fear of getting hassled by the Dept. of Homeland Security! My favorite kind of science was always the hands-on stuff, and this just really appealed to me as something that would’ve been a hell of a lot of fun to brainstorm. 
Here’s kind of a fun interview with the two friends about their process and backstory:
http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1120808–toronto-teens-send-lego-man-on-a-balloon-odyssey-24-kilometres-high
And they’ve also got some amazing pictures up on Facebook from the balloon itself:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.288451477876098.87467.288247574563155&type=3