Space Chair

On Monday 24 Mar, I attended with a colleague, dinner of the Sacramento chapter of the AIAA, held in Ranch Cordova, a few miles from where I work at Aerojet.
The speaker was John M Powell, the president and founder of JP Aerospace. His company does high altitude balloon flights into the edge of space.
What he spoke about with the interesting "Space Chair" mission which was used for a famous Toshiba commercial which can be seen here on YouTube. For the hour he spoke, Mr. Powell captivated the audience with the details of launch a chair into an altitude of 98,000 feet. Toshiba was developing a TV commercial for its new line of DVD cameras.
The idea was the new cameras will be on the balloon, focusing on the chair and as it ascends images of strange juxtaposition of the chair and the Earth will be taken by this new device. The images the John presented were amazing as well as the strange stories of actually trying to do a commercial with the art and production crew.
That was my first trip to AIAA and the evening was rather entertaining and met very interesting people. At the end of the talk I purchase a copy of Mr. Powell's book "Floating to Space" on his companies efforts to go into space in a slow manner using balloons. Need stuff!