Jack Bryan, ‘15
Within five minutes of sending his resume to Sent Into Space, Jack Bryan received a call from the company asking if he could come in that afternoon for an interview.
“It was a start-up, a quirky office; there was a lot of interesting stuff going on,” said Bryan, who at the time was offered a part-time internship as a design engineer at Sent into Space, a company that specializes in
space-themed marketing campaigns and publicity stunts.
The Sheffield, England-based company sends large balloons filled with gases such as helium and hydrogen up into “near space” – altitudes three to four times as high as Mount Everest. The company uses photographs and footage from space to create projects for clients such as Google, Audi and Samsung.
“I’ve always been interested in space,” said Bryan, who, in 2017, was finishing his master’s degree in aerospace materials and engineering at the University of Sheffield in England.
One of Bryan’s first projects for the company was the launch of “Aura” – where a deceased loved one’s cremated ashes were released into space from a high altitude balloon. The slow dispersal of ashes was filmed to create a keepsake video for the family.
“We had received a lot of requests from people who want to scatter their
loved ones’ ashes in space,” Bryan said. “Within 18 months it went from being a white board idea to a system that was generating revenue.”
In 2018, another Sent Into Space project involved Bryan traveling to Bangladesh to help an international development organization create a short documentary about the Rohingya refugee crisis. The company spent 10 days filming in refugee camps.
In 2019, Bryan was promoted to head of technical operations.
The 29-year-old graduated from Colorado Mesa University with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry in 2015. He taught chemistry labs at CMU and also used his chemistry knowledge to work with several Palisade wineries. It was after he joined a CMU campus chapter of Engineers Without Borders that Bryan decided to become an engineer, which led to grad school in England, and eventually his current career. •