Whether you’re a college professor or a kindergartener, JP Aerospace will take your experiment to space and back, as long as it fits into a ping-pong ball.

The organization’s volunteers aim to give everyone a chance at space exploration, and ping-pong balls set a size-limitation that let’s them do it.


About twice a year, a team of volunteers loads up a new batch of ping-pong-packed experiments into a homemade spacecraft and sets them free behind a two-story tall helium balloon.

“You can put random things in there to try,” says John Powell, the founder and “JP” of JP Aerospace. “That really never happens with space research because it’s so expensive. You have to know what is going to happen before you do it.”

The latest mission, which took off this March, had aboard 1,000 ping-pong balls from schools and researchers around the world.

Most of them were filled with simple objects like crayons, marshmallows, or gummi bears and decorated with googley eyes and paint. Others included multiple sensors and complex mini-computers.

“Most of the time, nothing is going to happen,” Powell says. “But one or two in a batch will do something amazing.”

It’s not always the most complex experiments that produce the most amazing results.

We’ve rounded up the most surprising reactions to space in this slideshow.

The tiny bumps that make the gummi bear rough are caused by a phenomenon called “outgassing” in which gas that was trapped in a material is released in a vacuum.

“I ended up having this discussion about outgassing with kindergarteners,” Powell says, “ and they all got it because they were holding this gummi bear.”

It turns out, however, elementary school student was actually conducting a college-level experiment on the effect of space on plastic. He had taken before and after measurements to see if the ball would, for instance, bounce differently (it bounces less) or have a different texture (it does) after making its trip to space.

“You could make an altimeter with crayons,” Powell says.