In this interview segment, Ashlee Vance talks with a project representative (Speaker B) about KFC’s unconventional public‑relations campaign that aimed to send a chicken sandwich aloft on a high‑altitude balloon to the edge of space. The company learned of the team’s balloon‑technology through Popular Science, reached out, and commissioned a cross‑country flight that would be streamed live, with a tracking website for the public. The stunt featured celebrity Rob Lowe as the mission‑control announcer. The balloon achieved near‑space altitude but did not stay aloft for the intended multi‑day duration, serving both as a marketing spectacle and a technology test for the sponsor.
And if I remember right, I can't remember the full sequence of events, but I think, didn't Kentucky Fried Chicken, KFC, did they come to you guys or you went to them to propose this idea?
They found us. They heard about our technology. I think they've read about it in Popular Science and, uh, they've reached out to us and asked us if we could launch a chicken sandwich to the edge of space. And they had this super cool PR campaign that they wanted to do, uh, where they would fly it across the country and video it the entire time. And you could log into a website and see where the chicken sandwich was as it tracked across the country.
And like, Rob Lowe was the, the mission control announcer on this. It was no joke. And, and I know I've written about this before, but now I'm old and I write a lot of stories. I, I, it didn't quite— did it— it got near space, right, but not, not all the way?
Yeah, we, we got to altitude, but it was— it did not fly as long as we wanted it to. Uh, so we did get up, but we did not stay up for multiple days. But it was still a successful campaign for the company. You know, KFC was happy. They got a ton of incredible footage and were able to downlink in real time video of the chicken sandwich with the curvature of the Earth behind it. But this was a big engineering effort. You know, we joke about it and say this is like funny, but like behind the scenes, the amount of work that went into preparing a chicken sandwich, building camera systems that went around it to capture and downlink real-time video. And by the way, we were still doing R&D on WorldView's balloon system. So even the, the actual balloon that we flew was an R&D flight for KFC, and they knew that and they were excited about that.
