BOLD business partners from Rugby have sent the remains of a beloved family pet where no dog has gone before.
Jacob Battersby and Callum King, co-founders of Rugby-based start-up business Zoomi, launched a high-altitude weather balloon carrying the ashes of Jacob’s late dog Oscar from Bilton to the edge of space.
The balloon climbed to an altitude of 119,000ft – over 22 miles.
The choice of launch site was personal for Callum who, as a pupil at Harris School back in 2012, was part of a science project that tried – and failed – to launch and recover a weather balloon, the payload of which was never found.
This time, the payload – complete with a camera which captured spectacular views of the Earth – was found, thanks to a ‘ZoomiTag’ GPS pet tracker designed and built by the company.
Callum said his school science project stayed with him for years.
He said: “We sent something up from Rugby, it never came home, and there was nothing we could do about it.
“Years later we’re building a company whose whole point is that a dog should never just disappear. Going back, launching properly from Bilton, and getting the payload home with our own tracker, only felt right.
“To send something to space and actually recover it, 14 years after my last attempt, feels unreal – and doing it on a tracker I built myself makes it feel even better.
‘We genuinely thought we’d lost it. Then the tracker pinged, only 15 minutes from where we’d planned the landing.
“When we finally got eyes on the payload, it felt like I’d come full circle.”
The balloon climbed to roughly 119,000ft – over 22 miles – into the stratosphere, more than three times the cruising altitude of a passenger jet.
Onboard temperatures fell to around minus 72°C and stayed there for more than three hours.
The balloon burst at peak altitude, releasing Oscar’s ashes into the upper atmosphere.
A parachute deployed and the payload began its descent, landing later the same day in open countryside in Nottinghamshire to be recovered by the pioneering pair.
For Jacob, the launch carried more than a tracker – as Oscar was the inspiration behind the company.
He said: “I lost Oscar at the start of the year, and Zoomi has been built around him ever since.
“When we started planning the launch, taking his ashes up there wasn’t really a question – it was just how we were going to do it.”
The recovered tag – cold, taped and slightly scorched – is now back at Zoomi’s workshop in Rugby.
