Well, this wasn't a headline I ever thought I'd be writing.
Premium cookware brand Le Creuset, best known for its striking orange cast iron casserole dishes, has collaborated with Star Trek to produce a branded series of kitchenware. OK, that's a weird partnership, but whatever; Trekkies gotta cook too, and a Star Trek casserole dish is a neat curiosity. It's got the USS Enterprise embossed on the top, a Starfleet logo handle, and the iconic phrase "To boldly go where no one has gone before" embossed on the inside of the lid.
What really caught our interest was the marketing campaign for this collaboration, because Le Creuset strapped one of these limited-edition casserole dishes to a high-altitude balloon and sent it into space (almost, more on that in a bit). No, we're not kidding — there is video evidence, as you can see below.
The USS Enterprise-themed casserole dish* was elevated to the edge of space by way of a hydrogen balloon. Since hydrogen is lighter than air, these balloons can easily exceed altitudes of 100,000m. At the end of the flight, the dish was then safely returned to the ground via a parachute and collected by the team (can you imagine spotting a parachuting casserole dish outside your window?).
Let's get the obvious thing out of the way first; by conventional definitions, the casserole dish did not actually go into space. It reached a maximum height of 110,095 feet (just over 35km), which is well below the Karman line — the most widely accepted barrier to space. Still, at this altitude, the casserole dish was above 99.9% of our planet’s atmosphere.
The Karman line sits at an altitude of 100 kilometres (54 nautical miles; 62 miles; 328,084 feet) above mean sea level and is something of an arbitrary divider because defining exactly where space begins can be rather tricky. The atmosphere doesn't just stop, so we had to draw a line somewhere, and this is the line that most scientists and governments have accepted.
So, it didn't really go to space, but it still boldly went where no casserole dish has gone before (to our knowledge, I don't think they're cooking up fresh batches of gumbo on the ISS).
This impressive feat was achieved thanks to a company called Sent to Space — a UK-based aerospace company that specialises in "upper stratosphere" launches for "global marketing stunts, space cinematography, video production for documentary and cinema, scientific research, aerospace R&D, educational projects and even ash scattering memorial services."
As cool (but also dumb) things to do in the name of brand awareness and fun go, sending a casserole dish to the edge of space gets a big thumbs up from us, and we'll be having some fun of our own with this Le Creuset Star Trek collection later this month, so stick around for that too.
*Fun fact: This style of casserole dish is known as a cocotte in French, though Cocotte also has another meaning that's a little more risque. The more you know.
