I Taped a Gold Nugget On a Pan And Sent It To Space!

Today, I travel 4,000 miles to tape an expensive nugget on a gold pan and send it up to space. The question is, will I get it back? Oh, it's burst. It's coming down. I think they're trying to steal it. So the first thing we gotta do is ship our green spaceship here to New York. I'm proud of you, buddy. I'd like to send this to space, please. Oh, I don't know about that. So I've been tracking this company for several years now, waiting for prices to come down. Just yesterday, a spot became available for a huge discount, so I jumped on it, and here we are. Filmed in Space is a company that launches things to the stratosphere, whether that's a picture, a golf ball, or cookies. Now, I'm sending a gold pan up there, but it wouldn't be complete without a piece of gold, so after I mailed the gold pan to the launch site in New York, I had a week to find the right piece of gold I was gonna sneak over on our journey. All right, so now that we have some time to waste, we have to pick out the right astronaut for the job. Now, I know there's a weight limit to what you can bring up on this balloon, and what I also know is that there is a little bit of wiggle room, which means our nugget can't be too big, and it also can't be too small to where I lose it, so. I picked a group of 25 brave soldiers that weighed between one and two grams for this mission, and each piece of gold went through rigorous training to get to where they're at. Go, go, go! Ready, fire! Have what it takes to become astro, yes. Drop down, give me this! I'm a soldier, you make mother lord of me. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you our astronaut. This soldier started his life deep in a crack I rescued it a couple years ago and took it home under my wing. This piece is bright yellow, it only weighs one gram, and it's flat and wide, which means it's gonna show up really nice on the camera, and ultimately, that's kind of why I actually chose it. Okay, see you in a couple weeks. All right, so the first step to launching our nugget knot to space is traveling to the launch site. So after taking a boat, a cab to the airport, a plane to Chicago, and a plane to New Hampshire, we were nearly there. Good morning, so we are here. Now, I was supposed to fly to New York because the weather changed, and it's really important to follow what the weather says when you're launching an air balloon in space. I had to change that direction, and I'm now in New Hampshire, or New Hampshire. Not really sure how to say that, but that doesn't matter. We are here, it's next morning, and soon, John will pick me up, and we're gonna go set up the air balloon, so I'm super excited. John, yay, nice to meet you. Hey, Paul, how are you? Good, good. Good to meet you, man. Perfect, so this is one of the geniuses behind launching stuff up into space. Are you excited? I am very excited. We love launching stuff up and get it into the stratosphere and get some really amazing views. Is this the first gold pan that's going up? This is the first gold pan. Yes! So as excited as I am to just get launching, we still had to figure out the exact launching spot, set up our space contraption, and also eat breakfast, because I'm starving. Okay, so this is our predictions, and I'm gonna actually have it run a fresh prediction. Each of these dots represents a landing spot one hour apart. So starting from the blue over here, if we were to launch at what I hope to do, this black line here is the path of the balloon. So this would be nice. It would land somewhere near here, Rochester, and actually, let me pull up the satellite map and see what we're landing in. Ooh, that would be, well, this shows us landing in the woods, but there's some nice big fields we could land in, which would be really ideal. So John here is a legit scientist, and I'm, if you guys are following along, leave a comment, let me know, but the whole idea is that it goes up, it comes down, he's this brain behind it, and I'm just gonna, I'm gonna help recover it when- That's right. If we can find it. So basically, using this technology, we can sort of figure out what the weather's gonna do so we can predict the balloon burst. Once we predict where the balloon's gonna burst, we can figure out roughly where it's gonna land. We don't want that burst, there's the burst, we don't want the burst to go any further east than this point, and that way, we don't risk it going out into the ocean. Yeah, because we don't want it also to land on somebody else's gold claim. No. We can predict roughly where it's gonna land. There's not a lot of public land, but you gotta be able to find that person and talk to them, and that's the challenge. I'll give you the quick description of our launch, which is a little bit tangled, let me fix it. The balloon's gonna get attached to this, and then it comes down here and attaches to the two boundaries. These wires would burn, and it would basically burn this line here and send this thing off. So we would lose my little inflation nozzle, probably $50, but that's not that big of a deal compared to the thousands of dollars that I would lose. Yeah, exactly. If it goes in the ocean. So to sum it up, for those of you who aren't understanding, I'm sort of one of those people as well. We want the balloon to go up and we want it to come down, but if it goes up and it goes out of bounds, these things will save our gold pan because these will cut the rope and drop our gold pan back to Earth where we want it, rather than it floating off to North Korea or something like that. I did once fly through a military operational area when I didn't understand what MOA meant. All the equipment went dead at about 50,000 feet. We heard a jet engine at 55,000 feet. There's only one type of jet that you hear at 55,000 feet. That is not a civilian jet. If my pan gets shot down by a jet, I won't be disappointed. Now to make this whole experience a little more immersive, I had to help with some of the wiring and build the stand that would hold our gold pan and camera. I didn't expect to get this involved with the project, but this was a lot of fun. So right now we're trying to figure out the right angle for the pan. Can you point it just a little? Oh, sorry, I can't see. Oh, yes. Once that was done, it was time to head to the launch site and quietly think about how I'm gonna sneak this nugget on the gold pan. Okay, we are officially on our way to the launch site. I feel like, am I more nervous than you? Or are you nervous? Oh, I'm not nervous. I'm just bummed that we have to travel so far. Okay, one more stop before we launch the gold pan to space. We're here at, I don't know where, filling up the air balloon full of gas. We're not filling it full of gas here. We're just getting gas for the balloon. I don't know how it works, but we'll figure it out. Oh, the pan looks so nervous. It's gonna be okay. So here we are, the moment of truth. Will our nugget be the first ever into space or will this be the end to an epic dream? There we go. Ooh. So here is our setup. Beautiful, scared little gold pan, ready for his mission to space. We have a little hole in the panel ready, which is perfect so I can screw in, you know, screw the pan in place. We've got camera numero uno, camera numero uno uno. And joining our mission to Mars, we have a couple other items here that other people have paid for. We have a photo, a cute little stuffy, another thing, and a watch. But this is the coolest, for sure. So this box here is empty while it goes up, so I can kind of put anything I want in here. So I'm gonna write a note to somebody super special, put it up there, and give it to them at the end. Okay, while John is going pee, I have to figure out how I'm gonna attach this piece of gold. I have double-sided tape that, it says it's strong, so it better be strong. Honestly, if it falls off that high up, I don't think I'll be that disappointed. Definitely not disappointed if a fighter jet shoots it down. I don't want the tape to cover the piece of gold, so. I don't know how small I'm gonna cut this. That should hold. Aw, don't cry. I'm so proud of him. Yeah, so it's, the balancing is a little bit off. I thought it was gonna be perfect, but it's just. So you need, like, something heavy in that pan. A teeny bit of weight, just to sort of, so that it balances out a little bit better. So when I put that in there, that's balanced perfectly. So we wanna find something about this weight. Something about this weight, okay. This would've been perfect if I brought a, you know, bigger piece. I was told that I needed something between one and two grams. Had I known we would have a lot more, you know, room for space, I would've brought a bigger nugget. A few nuggets. Is there anything in here that I could put up there? It's about the right weight. My wallet, I won't do that. These rocks are obviously way too small. That could work. I'll bring that as an option. Do you know what I'm actually gonna do? I'm gonna cut this ball open and put little rocks in it. Oh, here, there's a knife right there. Okay, so I filled this dog toy. Hello. So I filled this dog toy with the perfect amount of rocks to match the weight of our roll of tape. And once it was secured to the back, our rig was balanced. Now, to strap in our brave nugget to the ship. I really hope this is... I'll find it. I really, really hope this sticks. All right. I don't know where he's going. This is probably my only chance to do this. I'm gonna put this piece of gold on here right now, and hopefully he doesn't notice. But honestly, I don't really think he's gonna care, but I still wanna see if I can do it without him noticing. Good luck, soldier. Your life depends on it. Oh my goodness. Hee hee. I don't know what to expect. I can think of so many reasons that could go wrong with this launch, but the best thing to do is just hope for the best and be ready for the worst. I wanna change the camera angle for this shot. Over here is probably good. Here goes something. Record, okay. Okay, we're gonna now turn on the loud, annoying alarm. You can plug your ears, just cause this is... Yeah. I'm gonna have you hold onto these two bars. Good. That one's recording. All right. We'll record this going off. I'm ticking off. So whenever you're ready, just a nice gentle release. Five, four, three, two, one. Okay, time check. 1.33. I left my wallet in there. Well, your wallet's going to the stratosphere, my friend. That is too cool. I hope that piece of gold doesn't fall off. I kind of hope it does, actually. All right, so it's in the air and we have no real idea where it's gonna land, but that's part of the fun. Okay, so now, what do we do now? I'm kind of hungry, but now we wait. We kind of just watch it go up and try to recover it. Uh oh, we got a bogey on our six. I'm so proud of our little nugget. Growing up so fast. Ah, I wanna go home! So it is officially above the clouds. All right. How do you feel about that launch? I feel good. Successful? Definitely successful. High five? Yeah. Yeah, so we are currently, so there's the path. That's where we, we're right there and it's currently at 44, oops, 44,000 feet. Wow. It's currently minus 25 degrees Celsius. The pressure is 161 millibars, approaching one-tenth the pressure at the surface. You would not be able to breathe up there. So 45,000 feet, we're now officially above navigable airspace. Do you think a gold nut, do you think a gold pan could breathe up there? Do I think a gold pan could breathe up there? No, your gold pan is dead, my friend. So this is pretty cool. As our balloon climbs higher, you can hear the annoying beeping sound slowly get quieter and quieter until it's no longer audible. This is because at this height, there is no air for the sound to travel. Now, if you're wondering why you can still hear the wind, it's because wind is not a sound wave. All right, while this thing is climbing, John and I ate food and slowly made our way to the estimated landing zone, which does keep changing and sort of just forgot about the balloon. I just opened this Thai lemon and chili almond bag and I saw a squirrel and I dropped the bag and it went all in there and all down there. All right, we have just broke 100,000 feet. 100,000 feet, yes! That is awesome, that feels crazy. That's weird, man. That does feel crazy. A gold pan is at 100,000 feet right now. It's the first gold pan ever to go that high, I think. It is, I support that assertion. Now, our next goal is to see if it goes to 110,000 feet. It's still rising. But then hopefully 300,000, a million feet. Well, that would be something. It'd be a record, but we probably wouldn't get anything back. So there you have it. Our brave little astro nugget made it to 100,000 feet. All the soldiers back at home are cheering him on and I'm a proud daddy. Now, as it gets higher, you can see the camera lens starting to fog up due to the moisture, which I thought was actually pretty cool. Oh, it's burst! It's burst, it's coming down. It was at 112,984, what does that say? So it probably got almost to 114,000 feet, maybe. Maybe. And when we get it back, we'll actually see the data tracker that's on the balloon is every two seconds. This is every minute. I bet it hit 114,000 feet. But it bursts. So yeah, we have success. We have burst off. Burstage. So we have the coordinates where it's falling down to. So we put that into Google Earth and we can predict roughly where it's gonna be. It looks like it's gonna land near a field. And if it lands in the field, that is a very good sign that there could be gold around. So I would say the mission was a success. However, it's not actually complete unless we recover it. And this recovery is not gonna be easy. When the balloon goes around, what, roughly 10,000 feet, somewhere below the clouds, I'm gonna start looking in the direction to see if we can actually see it in the sky. Now, when you recover these balloons, it's important to try to be the first ones to it. The last thing you want is somebody to mess with it or even steal it. So we make our way to the area and hopefully be close enough to be the first ones there. So this is Garland Road. Third road, but I think it's still public. So far, no fences, no private property signs. I mean, there's still public numbers on here, so. So yeah, we might be only 0.1 of a kilometer from our screaming balloon and our scared gold pan. And I mean, worst case scenario, we walk down the road and then we can access it. Yeah, exactly. But I'm hoping we can drive down the road because that would make it so much easier. It also might be in a tree, so we don't know. So we just quickly stopped to return the gas tanks here. And the only time we're gonna actually see this thing in the sky is if we find it right now, because it's only at 6,000 feet up. And after this moment, we're actually gonna be driving to the estimated landing zone. So unfortunately, I don't see it in the sky and it's very unlikely that we will. But, that's okay. So what we look for is the, ooh, where's the stop signal? Hold on. Oh, there, the stop signal. That's what we look for. So that was 39 seconds ago. And that's our location. So let's plug that into GPS and drive there. We have a landing spot, which is good news. It's just a matter of figuring out if it's on public or private property. So the distance from the landed balloon from the nearest road is 0.1 miles. But unfortunately, that looks like a fire road, which could probably be inactive to the public. So the very next road that we can access is Garland Road at nearly half a mile. So we'll see what happens when we get there. So what we're doing is trying to get permission to access this area. We're not a hundred percent sure if it's on private property or not, but it's a very good thing to do to try to get permission. So what John is doing right now is trying to contact the landowner, at least for this road up here, so we can go up. Because you never want to trespass on private property, especially uploading the illegalness on YouTube, because you can get arrested. Unfortunately, I was hoping that this was gonna be a public access fire lane, because it's listed as fire lane, but it's not. I mean, I'm a tourist. I could always sneak in there and be like, I'm sorry, I'm an innocent little tourist. I'm all lost and alone. So I'm trying to keep my filming to a minimum right now. We're having trouble getting ahold of anybody. The government website that shows the land parcels isn't working, of course. The few houses in the area, nobody's answering the door. And it's gonna be getting dark kind of soon, so I might not actually be able to film the recovery, because I have to catch a flight tomorrow morning. So that's not really a big deal, but I really do want to see how our gold nugget's doing. He's probably so scared. So unfortunately, we were not the first ones to recover the balloon. We weren't aware of it at the time, but they were not just gonna leave it alone. What the f*** are you? You've been annoying me for hours. Okay, so we talked to another house, house number three, and they recommended we talk to their neighbor, so house number four, to see if we can get permission, because house number three thinks that house number four owns the property where the balloon had landed. So hopefully, house number four will be our lucky charm. Okay, I see somebody with John, and they're smiling. So hopefully, this is good news. So Brian is the owner. I don't know Brian's last name, but we got both a neighbor and this woman's a boarder. She boards her horses here, and this one's another boarder. That sounds boring, boarding. Well, they board their horses. Do you think the piece of gold's still on the pan? Oh, I added a piece of, oops. I added a piece of gold on the pan. We'll see, we'll see. If the stratospheric leprechauns removed it or not, we'll find out. So after spending about three hours trying to get permission to access the property our balloon was on, John was finally able to contact a neighbor where both that neighbor and John could actually hear the alarm on the balloon from across the lake. So we might be able to access it, because it's right at the edge of the lake here. It's on the other side, I'm pretty sure. It's like, yeah, so we can, they'll lend us their canoe. Oh, he's going to lend us the canoe. Yeah, so it's directly across. You see kind of a point that comes out there, and there's a point that comes out here, and the area that goes in, it's right back behind that. And listen real quietly. Oh, it's a nine volt battery. I don't hear it. I'm not hearing it either now. I did hear it before though. Yeah, well, yeah, it makes me a little nervous that we don't hear it anymore. But she says that the neighbor never comes up to this end of this property. So it should be safe. So apparently it has been moved according to the tracking system on the phone. So that's not very good. So as you can see, the yellow marker on the bottom is the position it landed in. And the new marker above that is where it's currently at. So it's clearly been moved, but the question is why? I'm not going to lie. I am actually really nervous that our balloon and everything on it has been tampered with. I mean, it has because it moved, but John said that he heard gunshots. There's a shooting range over there. So hopefully that's not related. And also the alarm system stopped working. So we just have to hope for the best. This isn't looking kind of good. It looks like there's a f*****g GoPro that came off. Look at this. Educational high altitude balloon launch. If found, please contact John and direction. I wouldn't take it all apart. But we'll let the PD do their thing. Well, f*****g. As John noticed it was heading closer to the lake, we decided to take action and use the canoe. And it wasn't long till John spotted a boat in the distance with what looked to be our parachute hanging out of it. John, I think they're trying to steal it. Oh my goodness. We just- That makes it easy. We just got onto the lake. We were all nervous cause we, and we f*****g track it. We saw it was moving and I was like, uh oh. So we literally just got onto the lake and we found a couple on a little boat. We started chatting with them. They actually have the balloon. So we don't have to trespass. What good luck. All right. That is f*****g awesome. It was the noise of it. We were more like- Did you figure out how to unplug it? For someone in distress, how to unplug stuff. It is designed so you can- Whoops, sorry. We don't want to crash into you. That is f*****g awesome. Thank you so much. No problem. There it is. Yeah, here it is. And that's- Wow. Wow, thank you. Hey. Holy, okay. So you have to tell me what this is all about. We will, don't hold this. You want this in the boat? I'll put it in the boat, I guess. So how did you recover it, sir? So we used the chain and the line with the fishing pole, cast it up and over. I took a side, he had a side and we like wiggled it down and the whole thing came down. Oh yeah. Thank you for sending up a prize. And I actually can send up- Our nugget survived. So that's his, he's got the gold nugget and the gold can. Perfect. That is fun. I'm actually so happy right now. Success. So thanks to Jen and Roy for saving the day. Okay, so now that we have recovered everything, I can now say the mission was a success. All right, so we recovered our gold pan and our special gold nugget. I don't know what I'm gonna do with this gold pan yet. I'm gonna probably just display it or give it away. Big shout out to John from Filmed in Space, the homeowner of this property and Jen and Roy for recovering our gold pan and making this video a success. Anyways, I'm gonna go back to the hotel, fly home tomorrow morning, and I'll see you on the next one.