School children made Teddy bear reaches 100,000ft into space

Roffa reached the stratosphere and travelled 18 miles before the balloon exploded due to altitude pressure.

He was launched by pupils at King’s Rochester Preparatory School field in Boley Hill, Kent, who recorded his journey using a GoPro camera.

Footage shows the curvature of the earth taking in the Thames Estuary, the Isle of Wight and across the English Channel to France.

Roffa was in the air for around four-and-a-half hours and the GoPro stopped recording an hour before he was found in Hadlow, near Tonbridge.

John Jones, head of computing, and Magnus Caithness, head of science, led the project nicknamed Operation Cosmic Dust

Mr Caithness said: ‘We recovered Roffa at around 7pm from Hadlow, but we think he landed at about 6.15pm.

‘A very nice couple were enjoying an evening in their garden when they saw a peculiar object falling from the sky.

‘They noticed where it landed and retrieved it, read the notice on it and called our number.

‘We were just a mile away looking where the last GPS signal had been sent from.’

Pupils, aged eight to 13, have been learning about space as part of the project.

They chose to name the teddy bear Roffa as former pupils call themselves Old Roffensians.