A flying house! Is this another case of life imitating art? Well, sorta. A group of people from National Geographic decided they would actually try to re-create a balloon-floating house like the one in the Pixar movie Up. And I’m not talking about just a photo op thing where they tie a bunch of balloons to a little house like a publicist crew did back when the film released.
No, I’m talking about an actual yellow house built from the ground up that was then set aloft and soared up to 10,000 feet with a couple of guys on board.
Actually, a crew of scientists and engineers created the experiment for the new NatGeo series How Hard Can It Be? The show will debut in the fall and each week try to duplicate amazing or virtually impossible ideas. If you watch the imbedded clip from ABC, you’ll see that the scientist in charge thought the floating house bit was way beyond reality. But with 300 or so gigantic colored balloons filled with a full tank’s worth of helium apiece, they did it.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you should be scraping your pennies together to get a flying house of your very own. I don’t think they plan to make a, uh, cottage industry out of the idea.
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