#SpaceSelfie Kickstarter wants to take your photo in space

How would you like a selfie that’s out of this world? Literally.

There are lots of unusual places to take a photo of yourself, but a genuine pic from space would give you serious bragging rights. A new Kickstarter wants to make that scenario a reality, without you having to undergo years of gruelling astronaut training just so you can impress on Instagram.

The ambitious project from London-based Jamie Welton and his colleagues at Aerospace Systems would see members of the public travelling to the edge of the earth’s atmosphere in the FOSSETT SB-1, a specially-designed high altitude balloon named after Steve Fossett, the first man to circumnavigate the globe by balloon.

Once up in the air, three times higher than Mount Everest, an in-built camera will capture your screaming vomiting awestruck face, and then you’ll plummet down to Earth by parachute. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to do all this alone: someone from the team will accompany you there and back.) If you survive this journey unhurt, you can then rush to tweet your photo ASAP.

Personally, I find the idea of travelling into space via balloon a little precarious, especially considering the team doesn’t have a working prototype yet and Welton doesn’t seem to have ‘PhD’ after his name. But I’d still use a nightlight if it were socially acceptable, so I may not be the best judge of brave ventures.

So far, they’ve raised £513 of their £70,000 goal with 28 days to go. There’s still plenty of time for them to pull this off, but I hope they won’t be too disappointed if they don’t. After all, there’s always Photoshop.

Image via NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Flickr.