Adorable children's letters adorably fly to the edge of space and back
A series of heartfelt letters written by children were recently launched into the heavens — the stratosphere, specifically — and brought back to Earth, where they were returned to the kids who wrote them.
World View, a private spaceflight company aiming to eventually send people to the edge of space, loaded the messages into a sparkly gift box and sent them up about 95,000 feet in the air.
The company managed to recover the box upon its return. They then mailed all of the letters back to the children, but not before they were all signed by former NASA astronaut and chief World View pilot Ron Garan. World View also sent a photo of the box in space to the participating kids.
The letters, which took off for the upper atmosphere on Dec. 10, detailed what the children would say to planet Earth if they could look down at it from above.
Some of the kids asked for world peace or kindness while others had more specific requests.
Seven-year-old Sophia, for instance, asks that people "stop killing pigs and makeing bacon plese do it. plese make donuts cheper plese do it [sic]."
Garan, who used to work as an astronaut with NASA, hopes that the World View experience will help people experience the "overview effect," a shift in perspective from seeing the world as a group of divided countries, as one might from Earth, to seeing the planet as a whole.
"I left NASA about two-and-a-half years ago, and I left for really one reason," Garan told Mashable in February. "That was to share the perspective that we have of our planet from space and to do that full-time. I truly believe that perspective has profound implications for how we tackle the problems we face, how we deal with each other, politics, for every aspect of human life."
World View is in the process of testing their balloon system, which is designed to take riders on a private and gentle ride up to the edge of space and back. Other companies like Virgin Galactic or even Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin are also aiming to send customers to suborbital space, but both companies are planning to use rocket-powered flight to reach the upper atmosphere. World View's balloon approach is what sets it apart.
Plus it might be significantly less expensive to fly with World View. Virgin Galactic is charging $250,000 per seat, which makes World View tickets — priced at a mere $75,000 a pop — look like a steal. Relatively speaking, of course.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
