On this day in 1982, a dude named Larry Walters entered aviation history as the pilot of a craft called Inspiration I.
It was a lawn chair attached to 42 large weather balloons.
Walters was a truck driver, but his dream was to fly.
He figured he’d float up 30 feet or so and then shoot out the balloons with his pellet pistol to make a controlled descent.
He went 16,000 feet up, at which point pilots in the air above San Pedro had to radio in to say, there’s a guy in a lawn chair up here, what do we do?
Eventually Walters started shooting out the balloons, but then he dropped the pistol.
A helicopter had to help him get back down to Earth, where the authorities issued a hefty fine for operating a flying lawn chair without proper licensure or certification, or whatever.
But the man who the media nicknamed “Lawn Chair Larry” wasn’t fazed by the legal consequences.
He’d lived the dream of flying he had for 20 years and then some.
His personality, though, remained down to earth.
When interviewers asked Walters why on earth he decided to try flying by attaching eight-foot weather balloons to a department store lawn chair, he had an easy answer: “A man can’t just sit around.”
Larry Walters brought a camera with him on his lawn chair flight, but he says the view was so amazing he didn’t stop to take a picture.
His successors in amateur flight make sure to document the journey, like the high school students in Toronto, Ontario.
They used a weather balloon to launch a Lego figure into near space, which is not quite off the earth, but high up enough that below you see the earth’s curve (and above that, the void).
The star of this show was the little Lego figure, who smiled the whole way up and down, carrying a little Canadian flag the whole way.
And there were no little Lego police back on the ground waiting to take the astronaut into custody!
Teens Put Lego Man in ‘Space’ (Actually Stratosphere)
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Photo by omnibus via Flickr/Creative Commons
