From the World Belly Flop Championships to the World’s Longest Ever Slip’n’Slide, Brisbane based Nova 106.9FM’s breakfast team has a history of pushing the boundaries and today, Ash, Kip and Luttsy, have taken their next idea to the very edge of the world.
When two local high school students shared their escapades of launching high altitude weather balloons with Ash, Kip and Luttsy, the trio became fixated on sending themselves into space and taking listeners along for the ride.
Not having a NASA level budget, Nova 106.9FM Program Director Jay Walkerden, suggested the boys create individual “bobble heads” and launch them into space instead.
The trio were quickly reproduced in plastic, and their bobble heads set off on a road trip to find the right remote location to safely launch their space craft; the ‘Jobbernaut One’.
Nova listeners were invited to get on board by entering a competition to win a section of the estimated landing area, and if the Jobbernaut One lands on their section of the grid, the listener would win $5,000.
Arriving at country Coonabarabran, the destination the experts recommended as the safest place to launch and retrieve the Jobbernaut One, the Nova Brisbane breakfast team were quickly joined by a crowd of curious locals as they prepared their launch site.
Listeners and locals alike joined in with Ash, Kip and Luttsy’s excited countdown, which was quickly followed by loud cheers as the Jobbernaut One cleared the launch pad and headed into space.
Luttsy yelled to the crowd: “1300 man hours, two space cadets, three Go-Pros, three bobble heads, one lunatic boss and the Jobbernaut One is headed to space!”
The Jobbernaut One, at different stages, registered wind speeds of up to 150km/hr, took almost two hours to reach 31kms above earth (101,406 feet – a plane gets to 40,000) and captured seamless panoramic video from the stratosphere.
Two hours later the Jobbernaut plummeted back to earth, and the Nova team scrambled to locate its final resting place.
A three hour search, culminating in a trek through a farmer’s wheat field, revealed the Jobbernaut One had safely returned to earth, but one of the bobbleheads, Luttsy, exploded on re-entry.
View the video below:
It's a brilliant promotion idea to launch the bobbleheads into space. When our worpshop at www.bobbles.com.au made the bobbleheads for them, we never expected the items will be sent into sky for thousands of meters. No wonder the tech guys in Nova kept asking us to keep the weight of the bobbleheads under 500g. No I understand. Fantastic job!!