Slideshow: Weather balloon snaps pics

AUSTIN (KXAN) - Reagan Garner, a junior at Hays High School, made a deal with his father, Doug Garner.

"We made a little contract," said the elder Garner. "We had a little agreement; we both signed it. I told him, 'Reagan, I'll front you $100, you know, to do this, to buy the parts. But if it's a failure, you're going to have to pay me $50 back. But if it's a success, I'll give you an additional $50."

"It definitely worked; the contract helped," said Reagan. "I had to actually sign it and it gave me a feeling of being of great importance. This had to be a success. I wasn't going to let it be a failure."

The project involved packing a camera, a Blackberry telephone and a battery charger inside a Styrofoam cooler. The cooler was attached to a weather balloon and a parachute. The idea was to launch the payload in the helium filled balloon and send it to the very edge of space with the camera firing off a shot every six seconds along the way.

"I heard the idea from three M.I.T. students," said Reagan. "They were interviewed and put on Yahoo. They provided a few instructions and the hardware they used and they were really supportive of it and they had great results. They posted their pictures and I thought, 'If I could send up simple household items, you know, it's not that expensive; it's doable.'"

Saturday morning, Oct. 24 dawned clear and calm and the Garner father and son team, along with Orrin Deaver, a friend of Reagan's from Fort Worth went to work. They held the balloon mounted cooler high overhead and let it go. As the apparatus ascended, the first few picture captured Reagan's school and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in South Austin, with the towns of Round Rock and Georgetown in the distance beyond. Higher and higher, the balloon went, corralling photographs of East Texas as it rose.

"It's really high; it's in the stratosphere, the upper stratosphere," said Reagan. "It was just incredible."

Then at 93,000 feet, the balloon popped and the capsule began falling, rocking back and forth, but still firing off photos every six seconds. As the atmosphere thickened, the parachute filled with air. The payload raced toward the ground at a manageable 40 miles an hour.

A photo taken facing east caught a view of Houston, the Texas Gulf Coast and Trinity Bay. The outskirts of the Sam Houston National Forest came into view and the cooler came to rest in a pine tree at a subdivision construction site.

"The next day, Garner and his dad used a GPS unit to locate their baby. It had traveled 150 miles to the outskirts of New Waverly, Texas.

"I sent a balloon and a capsule and took pictures of space," said a beaming Reagan Garner. "I wanted to be able to say that and I did."

Next up on his plate: Another balloon launch, this time with a video camera aboard. Further along, the young man has his sights on the United States Air Force.