Above the Clouds: Oscar Made It to the Edge of Space

A few weeks ago we wrote about One Last Adventure — the launch we'd been planning with Jacob Battersby to send the ashes of his late dog Oscar to the edge of the atmosphere on a weather balloon. A ZoomiTag was going up with him, partly as a tribute, partly as the most extreme product test we could possibly run.

On 7 May at 14:24, the balloon lifted off. By 19:14 the same evening, the payload was back on the ground and in our hands.

He Made It

The original plan was simple in theory and a little terrifying in practice. Lift the payload from a field in the UK using a high-altitude balloon. Climb past the clouds, past the commercial flight paths, into temperatures of around –60°C and air pressure close to vacuum. Burst. Release Oscar's ashes. Bring the rest home.

The photo at the top of this post is from the moment just before the burst. That's the curve of the Earth, the dark of near-space, and the sun catching the edge of the atmosphere. It's a real photo, taken from a foam box held together with parcel tape and red parachute cord — and somewhere on the other side of that frame, Oscar was on his last walk.

It's not an ending Jacob planned. But looking at this photo, it's the one that feels right.

The View From 38km

The image you're looking at is more or less unedited. The ZoomiTag is clipped to the top of the payload — that small green block with the white Z logo. Beneath it: a foam capsule wrapped in tape and reinforcement, holding the camera, the GPS, the recovery beacon, and Oscar.

What you can't see in a single still is everything around it. The complete silence at altitude. The way the sky goes from pale blue to deep navy to the absolute black above the curve. The fact that, the whole time the camera was running, the ZoomiTag was pinging its position back to a phone in a car somewhere over the Pennines.

That last part is the one that matters most to us.

Recovering Zoomi With Zoomi

Near-space payloads are notoriously hard to find. The balloon drifts on jet-stream winds for hours, the parachute drift adds another wide radius on top, and the landing zone can end up tens of kilometres from the predicted point. Hobbyists routinely lose entire payloads — cameras, instruments, hard work — to fields, forests, and the sea.

We didn't lose this one. The ZoomiTag did exactly what it's designed to do on every much smaller adventure — every garden, every walk, every accidental gate left open. It reported its location continuously, held a strong signal through the descent, and gave us a live blue dot on a map to drive to.

We followed it from lift-off, watched it climb, watched it burst, watched it fall. When it touched down, the dot stopped moving. We drove, parked, opened the app, and walked. Within a few minutes we were standing over a foam box in a field with Oscar inside.

That's the whole pitch for ZoomiTag in one sentence: if a tag can survive a trip to 38km up and still tell you exactly where it is on the way down, it can handle whatever your dog or cat puts it through.

The Send-Off

Oscar's ashes were released as planned at altitude, scattered across the upper atmosphere on the way down. Jacob has been documenting the build-up, the launch day itself, and the recovery on his Instagram, and there's more from him to come this week.

For us, this is the project finished. The footage is being edited, the recovery photo is on the wall, and the tag itself — battered, taped, slightly singed in places — is sitting on a desk in our office. We don't know yet whether it'll go in a box on a shelf or back onto a collar. Either feels appropriate.

Thank You

To Jacob — for trusting us with something this personal. To everyone who pre-ordered a ZoomiTag Health in the run-up to launch and made the production batch happen on time. To everyone who shared Oscar's story, sent a message, or quietly hoped the balloon would come back. It did. He had the view of a lifetime. We got him home.

This was always meant to be more than a stunt. It was a way of saying — out loud, in the most extreme possible way — what we actually believe: dogs and cats should always be findable. Wherever the adventure takes them.

— The Zoomi Team