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I wait for the day one of those "space" experiments by some high-school student (and his parents) ends up crashing a jet engine or lands on a windshield of a van going 80 miles/hour.

It's all fun until reality and hits you right in the face and you pay for your YouTube video for the rest of your life. Is it likely to happen? No, but that wont save you afterwards.

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There are actually pretty strict rules for the high-altitude balloon people in terms of payload weight/volume, and being visible to aircraft, both visually and on radar.

http://www.eoss.org/pubs/far_annotated.htm

Basically they have to be made so that on any collision the payload will break off safely, and that when it falls it won't seriously damage anything that it hits.

That notwithstanding, if it lands on a busy interstate, it could be a problem.

The odds of it happening on any given trip are low. But in the long run every weird coincidence will happen.

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