High-altitude balloon missions are so mainstream that iPhones, "Star Trek" action figures, Lego toys and political bobblehead dolls have all taken their turns rising to the edge of space — but what about Hello Kitty? Now the lovable Japanese plush cat has made its own mark on the final frontier, thanks to 13-year-old Lauren Rojas.

Rojas, a seventh-grader at Cornerstone Christian School in Antioch, Calif., settled on the idea of sending a Hello Kitty doll to the stratosphere for her science project. The doll was provided by her dad, who picked it up during up a business trip to Tokyo. The girl (who was 12 at the time) perched the kitty in a cute silver rocket ship, positioned it amid flight gear from High Altitude Science, festooned the rig with GoPro Hero2 video cameras, filled up the lighter-than-air balloon — and then let 'er rip.

The aim of Rojas' experiment was to gauge air pressure and temperature as the balloon-borne experiment package rose — and she picked up some interesting effects: The peak winds exceeded 60 mph at the 10,000-foot level. The temperature fell from 43 degrees Fahrenheit (6 degrees Celsius) as low as 22 degrees below zero F (-30 degrees C) when the balloon popped at an altitude of 93,625 feet (28,537 meters).

That's less than a third of the way to the internationally accepted boundary of outer space, which is at an altitude of 62 miles or 100 kilometers. But as this YouTube video about the flight demonstrates, it's high enough to get a great view of Earth below the black sky of space. The package fell back to Earth and landed 47 miles (75 kilometers) from the launch site, 50 feet up in the branches of a tree. Which is an apt place for a wayward kitty to end up.

For more about the feat, check out this report from the New York Daily News.

Still more high-altitude adventures:

• A rise and fall that's out of this world
• How a space train was brought to life
• MIT acceptance letter hits the heights

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Published at 3:58 p.m. ET Feb. 6.

Sending your child's toy train into the stratosphere is no mean feat, but turning that train into an animated character requires a special blend of mechanical and computer-generated magic. Ron Fugelseth just happened to be the right magician for the job, as evidenced by the video that he and his 4-year-old son Jayden created.

Fugelseth's video traces the flight of his son's silver train, named Stanley, to an altitude of 18 miles or so. From that height, Stanley could see the curvature of the planet with the black sky of space above. The train's face reflects the wonder of the sight — as well as his distress when the helium-filled balloon that got him that high bursts into bits. The animation is what transforms the tale of Jayden's toy train from your garden-variety balloon experiment into ... something wonderful.

"To me, the whole thing about this is the storytelling," Fugelseth, creative director for California-based Oxygen Productions, told me today.

It all started months ago, when Fugelseth saw the video showing the balloon-borne flight of a Lego astronaut. "When I saw that Lego video, I thought, 'I should totally see if I could get Stanley to space,'" he said.

But Stanley is no cheap prop. To Jayden, the train is much more than a toy. "It's been his imaginary friend since he was 2," Fugelseth said. "It's like Linus and his blanket. This never would have popped into my head if it wasn't for that family member, that little white train."

So Fugelseth did his research and assembled the components for a stratospheric flight: a mail-order weather balloon, a palm-size HD video camera, an old cellphone capable of transmitting GPS location readings, a pocket warmer for heat, the necessary batteries, and a foam box for insulation and padding. (Check out the YouTube video description for other details, such as the procedure for letting the FAA know you're sending up a high-altitude balloon.)

Four weeks ago, Fugelseth and his son launched Stanley from Tracy, Calif. Then they waited for the balloon to pop and for the payload to come back down. When Fugelseth lost the cellphone signal, he worried over whether he'd ever be able to recover the precious cargo — but the phone "magically started working again," he said. With a little assistance from Dad, Jayden found Stanley in a cornfield 27 miles from the launch site.

That's when the computer-generated magic kicked in: Fugelseth used video processing software to create the expressions on the toy train's face, just as he did two years earlier for a Jayden-and-Stanley video titled "A Train and His Boy." The trick isn't all that different from what Fugelseth does for his day job, but it's still a challenge. "It's not every day that a client asks for something like manipulating a face on a train," he joked.

Fugelseth finished the 2½-minute video about Stanley's stratospheric voyage on Wednesday night, and since then it's gotten more than 91,000 views and a raft of positive reviews on YouTube. "If any video has ever deserved to go viral, this is it," one viewer wrote. "C-o-o-o-o-o-lest dad in the world. ... Dude, you gave me a warm feeling, looks like there's still hope for the human race after all."

But perhaps the most influential review came from Jayden and his 2-year-old sister. "They just went crazy," Fugelseth said. "They've watched it a million times now. ... One thing that Jayden said was, 'I wish I was a train, so I could go to space.'"

Be patient, Jayden. Maybe someday, you'll fly higher than Stanley ever could.

More near-space adventures
For a more grown-up tale, check out this "Now Is the Time" video presentation, recorded by a trio of space enthusiasts using a weather balloon, a platform made of plastic pipes and two GoPro cameras pointed at an iPhone. The main video is a tribute to spaceflight, but the "behind-the-scenes" video just might be more entertaining: It chronicles the three attempts to get the setup airborne, plus a backstory about the director's efforts to propose to his girlfriend using video from the stratosphere. (She said "yes.") Here are a few more tales of high-altitude high jinks:

• 'PongSats' rise to the edge of space
• 'Star Trek' action figures take flight
• Gemini capsule launched on a string
• Balloons built for future frontiers
• Teens send toy above the clouds
• Twin-balloon airship hits high frontier
• Students reach high for launch photos
• MIT acceptance letter hits the heights

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Sending balloons into the stratosphere for final-frontier views is a feat that's now within reach of thousands of do-it-yourselfers, but the flight conducted on Monday by a team of high-school students and mentors participating in the University of New Hampshire's Project SMART was something completely different.

After the balloon's launch from Brattleboro, Vt., the cameras mounted on the scientific platform recorded pastoral panoramas of the New England countryside. Meanwhile, a miniature Geiger counter monitored radiation levels, and other instruments kept track of temperature and pressure. The scientific aim of the summer-session experiment was to see how the flux of cosmic rays varies with altitude.

By the time the balloon reached the 105,900-foot level, almost two hours after launch, the cameras were catching amazing views of the curving Earth beneath the blackness of outer space. That height is less than a third of the way to the internationally recognized boundary of space, at 100 kilometers or 62 miles, but the sight is nevertheless impressive.

Then the balloon popped. And that's when things got really interesting.

First of all, it's unusual to get such a clear video frame of the balloon actually popping. But more importantly, this mission tested a novel method for the recovery of payloads from that high up. Usually, recovery relies on a parachute landing. This time, the payload's descent was slowed by a 3-foot-wide (meter-wide), aerodynamically shaped disk made out of pink plastic foam and cardboard. No parachute was attached.

Over the course of 30 minutes, the four-pound re-entry package drifted downward to a spot 40 miles southeast of the launch point, in rural Massachusetts. When the students located the payload, it was intact.

"The re-entry vehicle was just sitting there as if someone had gently placed it on the ground,” Andrew Mahn, a senior at Sant Bani School in Sanbornton, N.H., said in a UNH news release.

UNH

A frame from the video captured during Project SMART's balloon flight shows the high-altitude balloon in mid-pop.

The successful landing proved the validity of the vehicle's plastic-and-cardboard disk design, said Louis Broad, a physics teacher at Timberlane Regional High School in Plaistow, N.H. "This represents a paradigm shift for the whole small ballooning community. I've never seen anybody else use anything but parachutes,” Broad said.

Broad and another physics teacher, Scott Goelzer of Coe-Brown Northwood Academy, were the students' guides during the four-week space science module for the Project SMART summer program at UNH. The balloon's rise and fall provided a fitting climax for the summer — and gave the students valuable experience for the future.

"It’s a simulated satellite project, from design through construction, launch, flight and recovery," Goelzer said. Building and launching the experiment cost reportedly less than $1,000. That super-low price tag suggests that the Project SMART made a super-smart investment.

Where in the Cosmos
The picture of the popping balloon served as this week's "Where in the Cosmos" puzzle on the Cosmic Log Facebook page. Three of the Facebook followers — Gabrielle Wolf-Stahl, James Sloan and Kit Watson — took no time at all to identify the picture correctly. To reward their quick wits and fast fingers, I'm sending them pairs of 3-D glasses in the mail. Want to get in on the fun? Click the "like" button for the Facebook page and stay tuned for the next"Where in the Cosmos" challenge on Aug. 11.

More high-altitude high jinks:

• Watch Star Trek action figures take flight 
• Gemini capsule launched on a string
• Teens send toy above the clouds
• Twin-balloon airship hits high frontier
• Students reach high for launch photos
• MIT acceptance letter goes to near-space

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

They're action figures rather than real actors, and it's the stratosphere rather than outer space — nevertheless, it was a bold stroke to gather funding from Kickstarter contributors to send the captains from the Star Trek saga toward the heavens. The payoff from more than $6,000 in contributions is on view in this video from the Discovery Channel's "Daily Planet" program.

A team of engineering students from the University of Illinois, captained by Logan Kugler and Shannon Downey, pulled off the high-altitude balloon stunt on May 5. More than 150 folks contributed $6,193 through the Kickstarter website. As a result, the "Send Picard to Space" venture sent up an action-figure away team that included not only "Next Generation" Captain Jean-Luc Picard, but Riker and Data plus James T. Kirk and custom-made dolls representing "Star Trek" filmmakers J.J. Abrams and Roberto Orci.

The 90-minute flight brought the balloon-borne spaceships and their crews, as well as six HD video cameras, up to a height of about 100,000 feet before the balloon popped and the apparatus fell back to Earth for recovery. The Discovery Channel spot aired last month, and a follow-up video is being put together by Kugler's team.

In an account written for StarTrek.com, Kugler says he'll soon hand-deliver the balloon-flown action figures to their real-life counterparts in Los Angeles. "Picard and Kirk still have about 20,000 more light-years to go, but this is a start," Kugler wrote.

Balloon-enabled flights to the 100,000-foot region of the stratosphere, known as "near-space," are becoming almost routine. Such flights don't rise anywhere near as high as true spacecraft such as SpaceShipOne or the SpaceX Dragon. The internationally accepted boundary of outer space is more than three times as high: 100 kilometers, or 328,000 feet. But even at the 100,000-foot level, you get an impressive view of the earth below and the black sky of space above. For another example of the genre, check out this "First Tent in Space" video, produced last month to publicize Scotland's Vango AirBeam tents. Then click on the links below.

More near-space adventures:

• Gemini capsule launched on a string
• Balloons built for future frontiers
• Teens send toy above the clouds
• Twin-balloon airship hits high frontier
• Students reach high for launch photos
• MIT acceptance letter goes to near-space

Update for 12:35 a.m. ET June 2: To get the full picture, you should check out Kugler's photo essay for StarTrek.com. 

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

JP Aerospace

A 2-inch-long paper model of a 1960s-era Gemini capsule hangs from a string in front of a camera mounted on a balloon-borne platform at an altitude of more than 97,000 feet. Meanwhile, the moon hangs in the far background, sans string.

So what if it's only a paper spaceship? This year marks the 50th anniversary of Project Gemini's christening, and you could regard this small-scale re-creation of a Gemini space mission as a fitting tribute to the times.

The original 19-foot-long Gemini spacecraft was built to accommodate two astronauts for missions that would lay the groundwork for the Apollo missions to the moon. This 2-inch-long Gemini model was built by John's Paper Models and hung from a string during one of JP Aerospace's high-altitude balloon flights in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.

"The model was flown to 97,704 feet on balloon during last month's PongSat mission. 980 student experiments were also flown," John Powell, the founder of JP Aerospace, told me in an email. The California-based venture sends payloads up to the edge of space at the end of a helium-filled balloon, and recovers the payloads after the balloon breaks.

The payloads range from mini-experiments that can fit inside a pingpong ball — hence the name "PongSat" — to the occasional chair or cellphone. These flights don't come anywhere close to the internationally accepted 62-mile (100-kilometer) boundary of outer space, but they do rise high enough to provide exposure to cosmic rays, the near-vacuum of near space and other conditions that can put space hardware to a rigorous test. And as you can see here, the flights provide an awesome view as well.

JP Aerospace

JP Aerospace's "Away 66" mission rises. The tiny model of the Gemini capsule can be seen hanging from the left side of the balloon-borne platform.

Meanwhile, another near-space mission has successfully sent "Star Trek" captains and celebrities into space, at least in miniaturized, plasticized action-figure form. StarTrek.com provides a photo essay chronicling the results of this month's "Send Picard to Space" balloon mission, backed by more than $6,000 in Kickstarter contributions. "The captains and equipment spent two hours aloft, 90 minutes of that in the stratosphere, until the balloon popped and the payload parachuted safely back to Earth," StarTrek.com reported. Stay tuned for the encore presentation. 

More adventures in near space:

• Balloons built for future frontiers
• Teens send toy above the clouds
• Twin-balloon airship hits high frontier
• Students reach high for launch photos

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

It's very cool that two 17-year-old Canadians sent a flag-toting Lego figurine into the sky on a weather balloon, as part of a weekend project that cost less than $500. It's cooler still that they got back some fantastic video of the toy silhouetted against the backdrop of a curving Earth beneath a black sky. But let's not call it putting a "Lego man in space." Even though the balloon ascended to around 80,000 feet, that's only a quarter of the way to the boundary of outer space.

That distinction doesn't take anything away from the feat that Toronto teens Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad pulled off this month: The high-school students worked during four months' worth of free Saturdays to put together their balloon-borne experimental package, including four cameras, a cell phone with a GPS app, a home-sewn parachute and a Lego "minifig" holding a Canadian flag.

When the wind conditions were right, as determined by a website that calculates balloon trajectories, the teens headed out to a soccer  field in Newmarket and sent their rig up on an $85 weather balloon. The data suggest that the balloon rose to somewhere around 80,000 feet over the course of 65 minutes, then blew apart. The Lego man and the cameras came back down to Earth, buoyed by the parachute and protected within a plastic-foam box during the half-hour descent. Eventually, the cell phone guided the kids to a field about 75 miles away from the launch point.

The cameras recorded two videos and 1,500 photos, documenting the Lego man's amazing trip up through the clouds. "We never knew it would be this good," Ho told the Toronto Star.

But it got even better: After the Star published the teens' story, they were swamped with media attention. Canon, the company that made the cameras used on the Lego man's trip, said it would give Ho and Muhammad top-of-the-line cameras so they could continue their "creativity and inspiration." Lego sent its congratulations. A Toronto couple offered to reimburse the kids for their costs. Reports about the feat filtered out to The Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Huffington Post and elsewhere. The YouTube video has been viewed more than 600,000 times, and there's even a Facebook fan page.

Most of the reports refer to the Lego man as being "in space" — which makes for a nice headline but is unfortunately wrong. The issue may not seem like a biggie, but over the past year there have been all sorts of things sent up on balloons to stratospheric heights — including a chair, an iPad (sans parachute), a vibrator and iPhones galore. Heck, a 7-year-old and his dad sent up an iPhone a couple of years ago, and the Toronto teens said they took their inspiration from the MIT students who kicked off the craze with a $150 balloon mission in 2009.

This is all great, but it could give folks the impression that sending things into space is so easy a kid can do it — so why are we spending millions or billions of dollars to put things into orbit?

Lofting payloads on suborbital trips beyond the internationally accepted boundary of outer space — 100 kilometers or 62 miles or more than 328,000 feet in altitude — is devilishly hard. Just ask Virgin Galactic. or XCOR Aerospace, or Blue Origin, or Armadillo Aerospace, or Masten Space Systems, or all the other ventures that are trying to open the suborbital frontier.

Putting payloads in orbit is much, much harder. Just ask SpaceX, which burned through three launches and millions of dollars before achieving its first success.

Ho and Muhammad haven't reached those heights ... yet. But someday, they may well be putting real men and women into space. The teens are off to a good start, and they deserve all the accolades they're receiving this week for their near-space adventure.

More about near space:

• Balloons built for future frontiers
• Twin-balloon airship hits high frontier
• Student experiments soar on NASA balloons
• Students reach high for amazing launch photos