An Auckland primary school is planning to send a toy bear sky high into space and break two world records in the process.
Students at Forrest Hill Primary School have already sent the stuffed bear, named SpaceTeddy, over 28km into the sky in November 2016.
Adorned in a costume the children chose themselves and attached to a helium balloon, SpaceTeddy took about three hours to hit 28.5km before the balloon burst.
After a short yet controlled descent the bear landed in dense bush on Rangitoto Island and was retrieved the next day.
The school is planning to send the bear even further in December 2017 according to NZME, using a balloon that's five times larger than the previous attempts to reach 40km.
This would be 5km higher than the current world record for a balloon flight and of course the record for stuffed animal space adventures.
"It's going to take him about two hours to get up there - and then obviously coming down is going to be a bit quicker," Marius van Rijnsoever, one of the launch's organisers, told NZME.
While launching a teddy into the atmosphere may be a fun afternoon activity Mr van Rijnsoever, whose daughter attends the school, says it will also be a learning experience.
The pupils have a series of activities running alongside Teddy's flight including GPS tracking, computer programmes sending back data from space and a remote controlled release of paper planes.
The organisers aren't quite sure when SpaceTeddy will be launched, but it will be sometime within the next two weeks.
"We are just waiting for a clear day with a good wind direction that means teddy won't drown off the coast somewhere," Mr van Rijnsoever said.
Newshub.
