From the BLAST website:
Filmmaker Paul Devlin grew up in a family of scientists. He spent summers at the high energy accelerator, Fermilab, where his particle physicist father was on the team searching for the top quark. One brother attended MIT and the other became a prominent astrophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania.
In the summer of 2005, this brother, Mark Devlin, invited Paul to Arctic Sweden to document the launch of Mark’s groundbreaking telescope, BLAST. BLAST stands for Balloon-bourne, Large Aperture, Sub-millimeter Telescope, and is designed to gather information on how our universe evolved by discovering thousands of the most ancient galaxies in order to unlock the mystery of how the first generation of stars were formed. To see these celestial births, it must go through a risky launch on a NASA high-altitude balloon and float above the opaque atmosphere for several days on its way to Arctic Canada.
When Paul arrives, tensions within the collaboration are high as technical obstacles and the worst weather in decades have delayed the experiment for weeks.
More here. [Go to Press Kit.] The film’s financing is interesting: “BLAST is opening itself up, via ArtistShare (the first film to do so on ArtistShare), to interested participants on several levels. If you want to be Executive Producer, $150k gets you there. Want to participate on other levels, from $50k down to $19.95? No problem: There are a total of nine levels of participation.” [Thanks to Craig Peters.]