This Exists: Real Life ‘Up‘ House, Complete With Balloons

by Mark Joyella | 11:03 am, March 7th, 2011

» 7 comments

Do the people at National Geographic have the best job, or what? Just try this at your next meeting at work: suggest taking a team out to an airstrip to see if, you know, it’s really possible to float a house into the sky using balloons, like in the Pixar film Up. When you get fired, head over to NatGeo, because they just did it.

Over the weekend, a team of scientists, engineers and “two world-class balloon pilots” launched a 16 foot by 16 foot, eighteen foot tall house using 300 eight foot weather balloons (all brightly colored, of course) from a private airfield near Los Angeles. In the process, they achieved the ubercool, making an animated film come to life, and they also set a world record for “largest balloon cluster flight ever attempted.” According to My Modern Met, the real-life Up house went way up–10,000 feet–and flew for about an hour.

The experiment will be part of an upcoming NatGeo series called How Hard Can It Be? The show debuts in the fall, but you can check out some amazing pics from the shoot here.

NatGeo, National Geographic, Pixar, Up

http://www.facebook.com/people/Joseph-Glackin/100000892011713 Joseph Glackin

BEAUTIFUL!
Semper_Map

yeah, but did they make a collar to allow dogs to talk?
http://www.mediaite.com Mark Joyella

Checking on the talking dog collar. Will get back to you.
Semper_Map

ha, thanks Mark.
The Tea Weasel®

Semper_Map said:
yeah, but did they make a collar to allow dogs to talk?

Man. That one is just too easy a setup:

“Sure. Go over and check out ndanielson’s posts on Mediaite. They’ve obviously gotten him a collar that allows him to speak and type!”.
writer

Mowing the lawn must be a bitch.
Dysanthrope

When I see stuff like this, I always ask, who is paying for it?