Kansas teens send burrito into space and back

GREAT BEND, Kan. - Two Kansas teens have done—while maybe not the impossible—at the very least, the hard to imagine. They have certainly accomplished something NASA has never even attempted: launching a burrito into space.

Jeff Keenan and Aaron Mull spent three months researching their unusual project. They rigged a seven-foot weather balloon, attaching a small cooler containing a video camera for visual confirmation and Keenan’s own iPhone as a tracking device.

Also in the cooler was one space-bound burrito.

Mull says they were inspired by something they saw at school.

“We actually saw a video at the beginning of the school year about someone sending up a camera on a balloon. And we wanted to do something creative and out there,” he said. “And we just thought, ‘Why not send a burrito up there?’”

The pair actually captured the image they wanted from the camera. It was a shot of the blackness of space with the sun in the background, and the blue ozone layer of the Earth.

The contraption was in the air around 10 hours, reaching heights of up to 100,000 feet. It finally landed 100 miles away in Solomon.

In case you’re wondering, yes, they did eat the burrito.

According to Mull it tasted like cold ravioli.