{"id":182915,"date":"2025-12-13T17:33:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-13T17:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/182915\/"},"modified":"2025-12-13T17:33:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-13T17:33:10","slug":"the-near-space-adventures-of-bradfield-the-bear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/182915\/","title":{"rendered":"The Near Space Adventures Of Bradfield The Bear"},"content":{"rendered":"

Admit it or not, you probably have a teddy bear somewhere in your past that you were \u2014 or maybe are \u2014 fond of. Not to disparage your bear, but we think Bradfield might have had a bigger adventure than yours has. Bradfield was launched in November on a high-altitude balloon by Year 7 and 8 students at Walhampton School<\/a> in the UK in connection with Southampton University. Dressed in a school uniform, he was supposed to ride to near space, but ran into some turbulence. The BBC<\/a> reported that poor Bradfield couldn\u2019t hold on any longer and fell from around 17 miles up.\u00a0 The poor bear looked fairly calm for being so high up.<\/p>\n

A camera recorded the unfortunate stuffed animal\u2019s plight. Apparently, a companion plushie, Bill the Badger (the Badger being the Southampton mascot), successfully completed the journey, returning to Earth with a parachute.<\/p>\n

There have been some news reports that Bradfield may have been recovered, but we haven\u2019t seen anything definitive yet. Of course, there are plenty of things you can launch on a balloon, but what a great idea to let kids send a mascot aloft with your serious science payloads and radio gear. Because we know you are launching a balloon for a serious purpose, right? Sure, we won\u2019t tell you just want the cool pictures<\/a>.<\/p>\n

No offense to Bradfield, but sending humans aloft on balloons requires a little more care<\/a>. We aren\u2019t as well-equipped to drop 17 miles. The Hackaday Supercon has even been the site of an uncrewed (and unbeared) balloon launch<\/a>. Meanwhile, if you are around Reading and spot Bradfield, be sure to give him a cookie and call the Walhampton school.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Admit it or not, you probably have a teddy bear somewhere in your past that you were \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":182916,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[85,46,141,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-182915","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}