TWO Worcestershire children sent a teddy bear soaring into space as part of a science project organised by their dad.

The Rees family, from Bromsgrove, had been working on the mission for more than six months but had to wait for the right weather conditions for the maximum chance of success.

A plan to launch in December was aborted because the predicted landing would have been in Poland.

The launch finally took place from a field near Broadway.

The helium-filled weather balloon carried a small 1kg package which included a camera, a GPS enabled mobile phone and a teddy bear, which 12-year-old Dylan Rees had bought for the mission while on a school trip to the National Space Centre in Leicester.

The average plane flies at 30,000ft to 45,000ft and the height the balloon reached meant it left the Earth and travelled into the stratosphere.

It took the balloon an hour and 20 minutes to reach 80,000 feet where it burst due to expansion in the thinner atmosphere.

Assisted by a handmade rip stop nylon parachute the package took 39 minutes to descend back to earth, landing in a farmer’s field in Kimbolton, Northamptonshire.

This was just five miles away from its predicted point of landing based on an online calculator which took into account factors such as wind direction on the day.

“We thought we would never see the bear again because we lost contact with the mobile phone during the balloon’s ascent,” said Dylan.

“On the Sunday evening the phone suddenly made contact again, broadcasting its GPS co-ordinates.

"Using Google maps we were able to establish its exact location. We were all really excited.”

The family travelled to Kimbolton two days later and the friendly farmer who owned the field returned the package to them.

The camera captured amazing footage of the entire journey which shows the curvature of the earth below and the dark sky of space above.