'Meatspace' author, artist send lamb chop to space in elaborate promotional stunt

When you’re promoting a novel titled “Meatspace,” one obvious (and over-the-top) marketing gimmick would be hard to ignore: Send meat to space.

That’s just when author Nikesh Shukla and graphic artist Nick Hearne did.

“What could be more ridiculous than sending some actual meat into actual space? And how easy would it be?” Shukla wrote for Vice.

“Pretty easy, it turns out—all we needed was a weather balloon, some helium and permission from the Civil Aviation Authority and we were good to go. We bought a GoPro camera, made a makeshift pod out of its packaging and forked the sizzling lambchop.”

So, in mid-June, they purchased a tandoori lamb chop from their favourite curry house, Tayyabs, in East London — and sent it into suborbital space.

The piece of meat was attached to a fork and hung from a 2-metre-wide weather balloon that was rigged with a GoPro. The balloon lifted off from a field in the Cotswolds, bursting about 95 minutes later at a height of around 25,000 metres.

The British friends couldn’t find the meat or their GoPro. The GPS didn’t survive the freezing temperatures near the Earth’s atmosphere and the camera wasn’t found near the expected landing site.

They launched a local campaign, hoping someone would step forward with news of their lamb chop. Sure enough, a farm worker later contacted Shukla and Hearne, telling them he’d found their chop in his threshing machine — about 132 kilometres from the launch site.

Unfortunately, this didn’t mean he was willing to play nice.

“The farmer made arrangements to meet at locations in Dorchester, a service station in Bridgend, and Weston-super-mare, but failed to show every time,” Shukla wrote.

“He dodged between different phone numbers and locations, every time giving excuses why he couldn’t return the camera. By this time the launch team began to believe that this was life imitating art. The main theme of ‘Meatspace’ is the lies that we tell ourselves and others in the modern social media-obsessed universe. Was this a case of elaborate catfishing? Or purely somebody attention seeking? I mean, we weren’t dealing with a case of rare diamonds here. It was a bedraggled lamb chop.”

It took the men more than four months — and some police involvement — to get their GoPro back from the farmer. (Apparently not everyone is impressed by space meat.)

The 100 minutes of “utterly unbelievable” footage proved the meat-flight was a success.

“Other than the grilled protagonist, we’re told that no livestock was injured in the making of this video,” Grubstreet reported.

Bonus: The space stunt earned Shukla and Hearne a spot on Tayyabs’ wall of fame.