does it strike anyone else as kind of suspicious
how every single winner of the Miss Universe pageant has been from the planet earth? like,
i don't even think that crown has left our atmosphere that doesn't seem fair! Seems pretty
rigged to me, so consider this my application to be a more... galactic Miss Universe.
<launch sequence activated> This is my crown. You may notice it's not on my head
where Miss America probably intended for it to live when they gave it to me... and that's because i yeeted
it to space. But to understand how it got there let's rewind a few years. Okay so the abbreviated
version is basically one night in college i was.... ...hanging out... with some friends, and we ended up
watching the John Oliver skate on Miss America which if you haven't seen, is hysterical and also
very spot-on: "And just a reminder to those of you at home it is the year 2014 and i am a fully
clothed man standing in front of a line of women in swimsuits awaiting judgment. Beautiful!" The rest
of the skit pretty much goes on to talk about how over the last 10 years Miss America has completely
rebranded to say that they're not a beauty pageant they're a scholarship fund. "It is not a beauty
pageant, it is a scholarship program" and their mission is to fund the college educations of
the next generation of doctors, lawyers, CEOs, and engineers. And at the time, i was not only an
award-winning robotics engineer but also the CEO of a tech startup that had just raised hundreds
of thousands of dollars in pre-seed funding and so me and my friends thought it'd be funny
to see if Miss America puts their money where their mouth is; are they actually looking for the
girl with the best resume, or is it still just a beauty pageant? "Absolutely not." So we went all Miss
Congeniality on them, and infiltrated the system. our physical fitness in
swimsuit winner is Xyla Foxlin our talent winner is Xyla Foxlin our new Miss Greater Cleveland and winner
of a $500 scholarship is... Xyla Foxlin and then as a winner of a local pageant i went
on to compete at Miss Ohio where i learned that pageantry is a learned skill and i was way out of
my depth. Luckily though i didn't really have any huge aspirations of actually going to Miss America,
so i used the week to make friends, have fun, and also make a statement. I wore my mom's wedding
qipao as my evening gown, which the judges and some of the racist people hated, and i also built
a musical tesla coil as both my senior thesis project for my engineering degree as well as my
miss ohio talent-- which i found out spurred the Miss Ohio director to remind the judges not to be
impressed by loud props and i count that as a win but if this middle school gal and her friends
were inspired enough to send me this note i say it was worth it. And this is the part that i have
filmed and re-filmed and re-thought about so many times over the last four to five months. I really
wanted to be able to take a stand and say pageants are good, or pageants are bad. But it's super blurry
and after a lot of conversations with friends and family i think i've come to the conclusion that
the people are good, and the system is really bad except that i feel like by bashing the system i'm
bashing the people but i'm not. They're completely separate and i want to make that very, VERY
clear. The volunteers that make Miss Ohio happen are genuinely some of the kindest, best, hardworking
people that i know; and the girls i competed with are now some of my best friends-- but it doesn't
mean that the system isn't incredibly broken and we should throw it away or send it to
the stratosphere or whatever. My experiences at miss ohio were really really complicated.
not only was i the only non-white contestant but there has never been a miss ohio of any kind
of color in its hundred year history, and it's so easy to take this, like, elitist route of saying,
you know, "i am better than that, that's a relic of the 1950s" which it is. But also remember that if
you're a girl in rural small town Ohio it could also be viewed as your way out. And so what better
way to celebrate my experience than to send the ultimate symbol of pageantry into the stratosphere,
as far away from all of us as possible. Let's do it! THIS, by the way, is Joseph Maydell. He's a former
flight controller for the International Space Station. That's right, the actual ISS, who was so
awestruck by the footage he was seeing of the earth rolling by below he made it his life mission
to share that with as many people as possible and that's why he founded High
Altitude Science. And by the way, i spent months researching how to launch a weather
balloon in a student accessible way before choosing and reaching out to High Altitude
Science specifically to sponsor this video so yes, they provided product but
they're not paying me. This little ad is because i genuinely could not recommend their
kits and flight computers more highly to parents, teachers, and general space enthusiasts. If you're
looking for a socially distant COVID-safe science lab activity-- i'm just saying, not much is more magical
than launching something of your own into the stratosphere. We're using helium to give this space
balloon its lift, so i rented this industrial size tank and connected the High Altitude Science
weather balloon inflator to it. We used a flow meter to precisely control exactly how much helium
could enter the balloon, but most people do this by measuring the force of the balloon's lift. And with
that set up, it was time to unbox the balloon. This is a 1200 gram balloon which is a little ambitious
for a first timer, but necessary considering we had two scientific payloads daisy chained totaling to
just shy of four pounds. With the balloon still in the bag i inserted the nozzle into the balloon and
made sure it was snug before unwrapping the rest of it. You'll notice the rubber bands for tying it
off are already on my wrist so that i don't have to find them later when i have a balloon that's
like, pulling me into the sky. I've also removed all of my jewelry and rings for this, as any damage
to the balloon can cause it to burst too early then it's just a matter of inflating the balloon
and making sure it doesn't touch the ground or get tangled up on you, which is a harder task
than it sounds on a windy day like today okay so at this point it is lifting itself... i'm
just providing it pats of reassurance. So we're now watching the flow meter waiting for it to hit
4360 and then we're going to shut it of. To be honest i was too nervous about letting this go to
get any good footage of tying it off, but there's plenty of great information on the High Altitude
Science website which i've linked down below i now have a balloon! This is generating about five
pounds of lift so i'm not working all that hard although i'm working really hard in my brain,
because i know if i let this go we don't have enough helium to fill another one. "All right Xyla,
are you ready?" Yes! Born ready! The last thing to do is to turn all the electronics in the payload
on, and make sure all the cameras are running running, "okay and this one?" running! "okay"
that, unfortunately for our ears, includes turning the audio beacon on which will help us find
it if it lands in a cornfield or soybean field all right so we are now heading towards our
predicted landing site... like first thoughts from launching the balloon was it's way cooler
to watch it float away than, like, i thought it would be. And i watched a bunch of youtube videos
of other people's launches, but i don't know, when you let go about yourself it's like a totally
different experience. "you're letting something go that's really valuable to you and you
have absolutely no idea where it's going" that's a great way putting it, such a good way of putting it
okay so we just broke 90,000 feet it's still flying! Honestly it's really hard to
portray in video how exciting and terrifying and enthralling it is to track a payload
to the stratosphere and back. What are we at it's about an update i want to see it right
now i wanted to live stream back down to me. 94000. 94,100. "so here's a... that's a pretty good
parking lot here" At this point we were pretty much driving in circles under where we were getting
pings from the APRS transmitter just waiting for the balloon to burst and fall back down we knew
it would travel a little bit once it hit the jet stream again on the way back down so we just found
a parking lot and camped out for a little while "i'll be so excited for you if we
break 100,000 ft." ME TOO! "because it's like the borderline performance for
this balloon with this much payload. 99 102 okay so we're about to find out if we've made
100,000 feet we're so close we're at like 99 102. 99,102. that was the signal let's wait
for the website to update... what do we got? a hundred thousand feet is our goal here
one thousand one hundred thousand ninety six it's gotta be a guinness world record like no one
no one else has launched a crown into near space no way. we're at 111,000 feet! that's crazy!
111! lucky number make a wish. 112,000. we might make it 115. On board we had an APRS
transmitter and a GPS... and that double redundancy is going to save us. I'm showing last seen 14
minutes ago? "Yeah that's what i'm seeing too" when the balloon burst at 112,000 feet we
actually lost contact with it for about 30 to 45 minutes because at burst, and we didn't know
this at the time, the scientific payload collided with the APRS transmitter destroying it and so
we just lost contact. And i wish i could tell you or explain to you how terrifying that is because
you're tracking this thing all the way up into space and not only that but we had instagram
lived the whole thing so all of my followers are also tracking this thing into space and then
poof! No signal. Nothing. Until we finally got a beep from our GPS Spot Trace which was our backup
locator and that let us know where it landed. But.... scary. So scary. So we are now five
minutes away from what we think is the ping of the landing site. Oh
i think it's in this field here... okay they're home so we'll have
to probably talk to them. yeah and i feel like this house on the left is the
best guess so we'll just put on a nice big smile we chatted with the really nice family in the
farmhouse on the property and got permission to go tramping through their soybean fields to
retrieve our payloads. Luckily there were cattle paths through the soybean fields so we actually
didn't end up doing all that much damage to the crop. oh my god i hear it! oh my god i see it! it's probably worth checking right
here yeah maybe the crown camera could tell you what happened... this is
what happened to the APRS... okay oh wow but like hey you got everything else back i'm not gonna be a downer though Yeah... somewhere in the middle of Ohio... is a crown.
So we have recovered our payload we're in the middle of a soybean field the audio beacon
was certainly very helpful. There was no tree climbing required and i'm i'm just really excited
to pull the data off of this, and get all the video and see what we have! And so without further
ado, please enjoy my crown's space odyssey. and for my fellow graph nerds here's
a nice Matlab plot of all of my data and to take the nerdiness one step further we did
some math and determined a handful of cornfields the crown landed in. For some reason NASA hasn't
tested the terminal velocity of a Miss America crown yet, but based on some estimations we know
it's somewhere in southern Sherman Township in Ohio. I have a couple more weather balloon ideas--
if you thought that was fun please let me know in the comments and share this video with all your
friends so that i can justify the budget to do another one. Oh, if you would like to win your own
sash, lucky for you Amazon blank sashes come in packs of four. I'm gonna be giving away the space
crown and this sash that i'm wearing right now on my patreon so feel free to join my patreon
if you'd like a chance to win it that would be your highest likelihood... um... and then i'll give one
away on instagram and one away on twitter so all you'll have to do is respond to the question
i ask on my post with this picture and you'll get entered into the drawing also on my patreon
i finally got my *life* together and i started doing monthly zoom hangs and so if you'd like
to hang out with me on zoom i would love to have you there, so please consider joining my patreon- i
would really appreciate it. And follow me on.. i
