The official Qatar World Cup football was sent to space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket before the tournament kicked off, it has been revealed.
Qatar Airways partnered with Elon Musk‘s SpaceX and Starlink teams to launch two FIFA footballs into the atmosphere, where they reached 76 miles (123 kilometres) above Earth and travelled at speeds up to 5,139 mph (8.272 km/h).
The footballs undertook a long journey, travelling from Los Angeles to Doha before being transported to Cape Canaveral in Florida for the launch.
The balls stayed on the Falcon 9 rocket for the first stage of its 800-mile journey, before being brought back to Earth to a SpaceX droneship in the Atlantic ocean, a few hundred miles from shore.
The official Qatar World Cup football was sent to space aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket before the tournament kicked off, it has been revealed. Pictured: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Space Station in November
Two official FIFA balls (pictured) stayed on the Falcon 9 for the first stage of its 800-mile journey, before being brought back to Earth to a SpaceX droneship
On return, the balls were flown by Qatar Airways to Famad International Airport where they were handed to the World Cup officials.
Qatar Airways said it was a ‘legendary journey for a legendary tournament, from space to kick off’.
The match balls, made by Adidas, use sustainable water-based glues and inks and were called ‘Al Rihla’, meaning the journey or excursion in Arabic.
It is not the first time, however, that footballs have been flown into space.
In 2018, Russian cosmonauts flew an Adidas Telstar 18 ball to the International Space Station before arriving in Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow.
The footballs undertook a big journey travelling from Los Angeles to Doha before being transported to Cape Canaveral in Florida for the SpaceX launch
It travelled 31 million miles (50 million kilometres) during its 74 days in space.
One ball, however, was left behind, so astronauts could play their own match in celebration of the 2018 tournament down on Earth.
The next year, Adidas sent a number of footballs aboard a NASA-contracted Dragon spacecraft for a study in the International Space Station’s National Laboratory.
The tests were to better understand the ball’s flight characteristic to help with design and texture.
In 2017, a football was found in the debris of the space shuttle Challenger that broke apart just 73 seconds into its flight in 1986, killing all seven crew members.
Upon the space shuttle was Christa McAuliffe, 37, who was on her way to become the first U.S. civilian to travel into space.
She was a social studies teacher at a secondary school in New Hampshire and had won a competition to take part in the mission, undergoing six months of shuttle training before liftoff on January 28.
The Challenger had previously completed nine successful missions and had been in service for almost three years.
It had spent 62 days, 7 hours and 56 minutes in space, according to CBS, but on its fateful last launch a number of technical malfunctions caused it to explode. It was the first major shuttle accident to take place.
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