There’s a spy plane flying over Denison, eighty miles north of Dallas. With wings nearly as long as a Boeing 737 and a huge turboprop engine, it resembles a dragonfly that just swallowed a beetle.

The first 3D-printed toy plane will soon jet off to the stratosphere. The rocket-powered airplane will reach an altitude of between 25 and 30 kilometers (15 to 18 miles) – three times higher ...

The stratosphere lies above Earth's lowest atmospheric layer, called the troposphere. At middle latitudes, the stratosphere runs from a lower boundary of about 10,000 metres to an upper boundary ...

Typically, commercial planes tend to fly in the lower region of the stratosphere, staying at altitudes between 6 and 12 miles. The SolarStratos plane reaches an altitude of 15 miles above Earth.

Watch a radio-controlled plane’s breathtaking journey into the stratosphere and back ... Windestål’s FunJet reached a height of 33,103 meters above sea level before his weather balloon ...

The stratosphere starts at about 30,000 feet, and climbing that high in a plane puts large mechanical demands on the aircraft, requiring a reinforced airframe and a lot of engine power.