Kings Bowl Is Sending A Cheeseburger Into Space

The burger is expected to reached 90,000 feet in the air.

Photo via Kings Bowl on Facebook

Photo via Kings Bowl on Facebook

Kings Bowl in the Back Bay thinks they have the best burgers on the planet, but now they want to take over the universe.

At noon on Monday, the food and entertainment establishment will strap one of their cheeseburgers to a specially designed vessel hoisted by a helium-filled weather balloon, to try to get it more than 90,000 feet in the air. The publicity stunt is a precursor to the bowling alley’s cheeseburger give-away on September 18, to celebrate National Cheeseburger Day at their locations in Dedham and Boston’s Back Bay.

According to representatives from the company, Kings will become the first burger-slinging restaurant to make one of their signature dishes take flight.

To make sure they get their hands on the grub, after it plummets back to Earth, the company has equipped the burger with a GPS device. Once they retrieve the food, they will commemorate its daring adventure into the stratosphere by bronzing it, and then hanging it up inside their Boston bowling location.

“The concept stemmed from a recent meeting, and basically, we were talking about getting attention for the cheeseburgers, and I said, well, if it’s the best in the world lets send it to outer space,” said Chris Haynes, who does communications for the bowling alley. Haynes added that the whole thing started as a joke, but slowly turned into the real deal.

They worked with a scientist to construct the device to launch the burger. It’s a simple device—a pod made out of Tupperware that they spray-painted. Once the pod gets to 90,000 feet, the balloon will pop from the pressure. They have been engineering everything for the last three weeks to get ready for the send off and picked Medfield as the launching point because it would be easier to track the burger after it starts its descent back to the ground.

Haynes said it would leave the Earth’s atmosphere for about two minutes total before falling back to the ground.

The whole event will be video-taped using mounted “action cameras,” so that they can later watch the launch from the burger’s vantage point. The entire space journey is expected to take about two hours, according to restaurant representatives. The burger is being launched from Medfield by the company’s mascot, a giant bowling pin named Woody.

“We always knew we had the best cheeseburger. Now we’re out to show it’s the best in the universe,” Kings Bowl owner Patrick Lyons said prior to the burger launch.

The burger stunt has been done before, Haynes said, but never with a cheese-topping. In 2012, a group of Harvard students helped the b.good burger chain blast their own meat concoction into the stratosphere, using a similar ballon contraption, during operation “SkyFall.” That burger was dubbed the “first burger” to ever go into space.