Egg Drop From Space

Summary

In an ambitious project, the script details an attempt to break the world's tallest egg drop record by sending an egg to space and returning it safely to Earth. The team's plan involved attaching an egg to a rocket, which would be carried by a weather balloon to the stratosphere. After reaching a certain altitude, the rocket would detach, free-fall, and use a combination of fins, a parachute, and airbags to ensure the egg's safe landing. Despite multiple setbacks and failures, the team learns from each attempt, applies NASA-inspired engineering principles, and ultimately succeeds in not only protecting the egg but also landing it safely twice over, showcasing resilience and creative problem-solving.

Takeaways

• 🚀 The goal of the egg drop competition is to design a contraption that can protect a raw egg from breaking when dropped from a significant height.
• 🌌 The original plan was to drop an egg from the world's tallest building, but the ambition escalated to outer space to 'future proof' the record.
• 🔢 The project involved calculating the terminal velocity of an egg, which is the maximum speed at which it falls without breaking due to air resistance, found to be around 75 miles per hour for an egg.
• 🛌 A mattress was tested and confirmed to be able to protect an egg even when dropped from beyond its terminal velocity, indicating the success of the first test.
• 🔧 The team collaborated with Joe from BPS Space, a self-taught engineer, to guide the rocket using movable tail fins towards a target mattress.
• 🐔 A fresh egg was sourced directly from a chicken, marking it as the first to potentially go supersonic.
• 🔄 Several launch attempts were made with various issues, including a GPS failure due to a metallic streamer interfering with the signal.
• 🔧 A coding error in the rocket's guidance system was identified and corrected after a failed attempt, demonstrating the iterative nature of engineering.
• 🔄 After multiple failures, a pivot was made to a desert location with a redesigned system inspired by NASA's Mars rover landing technology.
• 🎉 The final attempt resulted in success, with both the primary system using airbags and a redundant simple beach ball solution landing the eggs safely, showcasing resilience and problem-solving.

Q & A

What is the main objective of the egg drop competition described in the script?

The main objective of the egg drop competition is to build a contraption that can protect a raw egg from breaking when dropped from the tallest height possible.

Why did the team decide to take the egg drop challenge to outer space?

The team decided to take the egg drop challenge to outer space to future-proof the record, as humans are always building taller buildings on Earth.

What was the initial plan for the egg's journey to space and back?

The initial plan involved clamping an egg to the front of a rocket, attaching the rocket to a weather balloon, taking it up to space, releasing the balloon, using gravity to accelerate past Mach One, adjusting four fins for steering, and releasing the egg at 300 feet above the ground onto a mattress.

What is terminal velocity and how does it relate to the egg drop challenge?

Terminal velocity is the maximum speed at which an object falls when the force of Earth pulling it towards the ground balances with the pushback force from air molecules. For an egg, this speed tops out at 75 miles per hour, which is crucial for ensuring the egg doesn't break upon impact.

What was the purpose of the first trip to Gridley, California?

The purpose of the first trip to Gridley was to conduct a flight characterization test at a low altitude of 10,000 feet to prove they could steer the rocket using the fins before taking the balloon all the way up to space.

Who is Joe and what was his role in the project?

Joe is a self-taught engineer with a channel called BPS Space, known for landing a launched rocket SpaceX style. He was in charge of tracking and guiding the rocket to the mattress using movable tail fins.

What was the purpose of the metallic streamer added to the rocket?

The metallic streamer was added to the back of the rocket to make it easier to visually track during the launch.

What was the issue with the GPS unit during the first launch attempt?

The metallic streamer interfered with the GPS signal, causing the rocket's math to be incorrect in calculating its speed, which led to the premature release of the egg.

What was the problem encountered with the rocket's trajectory during the second launch attempt?

The balloon was rising at a slower rate than anticipated, which threw off the predicted trajectory, causing the team to manually drop the rocket.

What was the critical oversight made during the integration of the two systems on the rocket?

The critical oversight was not accounting for the bending moment that would occur due to the rocket's length and weight, which could potentially cause structural failure at high speeds.

What changes were made to the design after the failure of the initial attempts?

The team scrapped the old design and built a new system inspired by the Curiosity Mars landing, with a three times longer and four times heavier rocket, fixed fins, a two-stage separation, and cushioning airbags for landing.

What was the role of the redundant systems in the final launch attempt?

The redundant systems served as a backup plan. They included a custom beach ball with a second egg and a 20-foot streamer for a simple, direct drop, as well as a second parachute made from a piece of the Curiosity rover's parachute.

What was the unexpected issue that caused the final launch to fail?

The unexpected issue was that the cord attaching the rocket and beach ball to the balloon got wrapped around and tightened due to spinning, which pulled down on the balloon's self-destruct string, causing it to come down prematurely.

How did the team ensure the egg would not freeze during the ascent to space?

They ran vacuum and temperature tests on a raw egg and used heaters in the egg chamber to prove that they could keep the egg warm enough during the two-hour ascent to space.

What was the significance of the 'lucky orange parachute' used in the project?

The 'lucky orange parachute' was a piece of the parachute used by the Curiosity rover to land on Mars. It was repurposed for the egg drop project, symbolizing good luck and the connection to Mars landing technology.

What was the final outcome of the egg drop challenge after multiple attempts?

After multiple attempts and learning from each failure, the team successfully landed two uncracked eggs, one using the main payload with airbags and the other using the simple beach ball backup solution.

Outlines

00:00

🚀 World's Highest Egg Drop Challenge

The script introduces an ambitious project: the world's highest egg drop. The goal is to create a contraption that can protect a raw egg from breaking when dropped from extreme heights. The plan involves launching an egg attached to a rocket, which is in turn attached to a weather balloon to reach the stratosphere. Upon reaching space, the balloon is to release the rocket, which will then break the speed of sound and autonomously guide itself to a target location on the ground where a mattress is placed to cushion the egg's fall. The project is presented as a complex engineering challenge that combines the creator's experience with landing spacecraft on other planets. The first step in the project is to calculate the terminal velocity of an egg to ensure the mattress can withstand the impact at this speed.

05:01

🔧 Engineering the Egg's Safe Descent

The team conducts tests to ensure the mattress can protect the egg even at speeds exceeding its terminal velocity. They then proceed to a small farming town in California to conduct a low-altitude test at 10,000 feet to verify the rocket's steering capabilities using movable tail fins. The video introduces Joe, a self-taught engineer with a successful history in rocket launches, who is responsible for tracking and guiding the rocket. The narrator is in charge of the payload, including keeping the egg from freezing during the ascent. Despite meticulous planning and testing, the first launch attempt is aborted due to a GPS interference issue caused by a last-minute addition of a metallic streamer to the rocket.

10:04

🔄 Overcoming Obstacles in the Egg Drop Mission

After fixing the GPS issue by replacing the metallic streamer with a plastic one, the team conducts another test. However, they encounter a problem when the rocket's fins cause it to enter a tailspin, leading to a crash. The team locates and corrects a coding error that was causing the control issues. Despite setbacks, they make a final attempt, which results in the egg being released but not landing on the mattress. The egg is found intact, indicating that the release mechanism worked, but the accuracy of the landing needs improvement. The team reaches out to Adam Steltzner, a leading engineer in Mars rover landings, for advice on improving their approach.

15:07

🔧 Redesigning for a Supersonic Egg Landing

Following Adam Steltzner's input, the team decides to pivot from a precision-guided egg landing to a more general target in the desert. They spend months redesigning their system, drawing inspiration from NASA's Mars rover landings. The new design includes a larger, heavier rocket with fixed fins, a two-stage separation to achieve supersonic speeds, and a parachute with airbag cushioning for the final landing. The team also creates a redundant system with a simple beach ball drop as a backup plan. After extensive testing and preparation, they head to the desert for the launch, equipped with a piece of the parachute from the Mars Curiosity rover as a lucky charm.

20:07

🚧 Setbacks and Adjustments Prior to Launch

The team faces a launch delay due to an issue with the zero-pressure weather balloon, which is crucial for the mission as it can carry more weight and reach higher altitudes without bursting. The balloon's self-destruct mechanism is activated by a string that, due to a缠结, prematurely triggered, causing the balloon to descend rapidly with the payload still attached. The team's fate now rests on the redundant systems they've implemented, specifically the autonomous ejection of the payload from the tangled balloon and the deployment of the parachute and airbags for a safe landing.

25:09

🎉 Successful Supersonic Egg Drop and Reflecting on the Journey

Despite the unexpected tangle and rapid descent, the payload successfully autonomously ejects from the balloon and deploys the parachute, leading to a safe landing. The team finds the payload and confirms that the egg has survived the journey from space to Earth without cracking. Additionally, the simple beach ball backup solution also lands successfully. The video concludes with a reflection on the importance of learning from failures and the resilience required to overcome engineering challenges. The narrator then introduces CrunchLabs Build Box, a monthly subscription service that encourages kids to learn engineering principles through hands-on building and problem-solving.

Keywords

💡Egg Drop

An 'egg drop' refers to a competition or challenge where the goal is to create a contraption that can protect a raw egg from breaking when dropped from a significant height. In the context of the video, the egg drop is the central theme, as the creator attempts the world's highest egg drop from the edge of space, emphasizing the importance of engineering and design in ensuring the egg's survival.

💡Terminal Velocity

Terminal velocity is the maximum speed that a freely falling object eventually reaches when the resistance of the medium through which it is falling (in this case, air) prevents further acceleration. The script discusses calculating the terminal velocity of an egg to ensure it wouldn't break upon impact, highlighting the scientific principles involved in the egg drop challenge.

💡Weather Balloon

A weather balloon is a type of high-altitude balloon used in meteorology for collecting atmospheric data. In the video, the creator attaches a rocket with an egg to a weather balloon to lift it into space, demonstrating the practical application of weather balloons in achieving high altitudes for the egg drop.

💡Mach One

Mach One is the speed of sound, approximately 767 miles per hour (1,235 kilometers per hour) at sea level. The script mentions the rocket accelerating past Mach One as it falls back to Earth, emphasizing the high-speed challenge of the egg drop and the need for precise engineering to protect the egg.

💡Fins

Fins are aerodynamic surfaces used for stability and control during flight. The script describes the use of movable fins on the rocket to steer it towards the target location, illustrating the role of aerodynamics in guiding the egg safely to the ground.

💡GPS

GPS stands for Global Positioning System, a satellite-based navigation system that provides location and time information. The video discusses the use of GPS for tracking and guiding the rocket to the target, showing the integration of technology in the egg drop challenge.

💡Redundancy

Redundancy in engineering refers to the practice of having backup systems or components to ensure continued operation if the primary system fails. The script mentions building redundancy into the egg's landing system, such as a secondary egg in a beach ball, to increase the chances of a successful landing.

💡Parachute

A parachute is a device used to slow the motion of an object through the atmosphere by creating drag. The video describes the use of a parachute to slow down the egg's descent, which is a critical component in ensuring the egg's safe landing after being released from the rocket.

💡Airbags

Airbags are inflatable bags that are used as cushioning to absorb impact. The script refers to using airbags, similar to those on Mars rovers, to cushion the egg's landing, demonstrating the application of space technology in an unconventional context.

💡CrunchLabs

CrunchLabs is a toy company founded by the video's creator with the goal of helping kids think like engineers. The script promotes CrunchLabs' Build Box, a subscription service that provides monthly engineering challenges and lessons, tying into the video's theme of engineering and problem-solving.

💡Resilience

Resilience is the ability to recover quickly from difficulties or to withstand hardships. The video emphasizes the importance of resilience in engineering, as the creator and his team face multiple failures before successfully completing the egg drop challenge, showcasing the iterative nature of engineering and the value of learning from mistakes.

Highlights

Attempted the world's highest egg drop from outer space to test the limits of egg protection technology.

Original plan involved dropping an egg from the world's tallest building, but the idea evolved to reach outer space for a record that future-proofs the attempt.

Leveraged experience from landing on other planets to ensure the egg's safe return from space.

Encountered physical, financial, and mental challenges in creating the egg-dropping contraption.

Designed a contraption that clamps an egg to a rocket attached to a weather balloon for the ascent to space.

The rocket was planned to break the sound barrier and autonomously guide itself to a target location using adjustable fins.

Conducted tests to ensure a mattress could protect an egg even when dropped from beyond its terminal velocity.

Collaborated with Joe from BPS Space, a self-taught engineer who helped with tracking and guiding the rocket.

The egg was kept from freezing during the ascent with a small oven equipped with heaters.

Performed a low-altitude test at 10,000 feet to prove the rocket's steering capabilities before the actual space launch.

Encountered a failure with the GPS unit due to interference from a metallic streamer added to the rocket.

Resolved the GPS issue and faced a new challenge with the balloon rising slower than anticipated, affecting the trajectory.

The rocket went into an uncontrolled spiral due to a coding error in the guidance system.

After multiple failures, consulted with Adam Steltzner, a Mars landing expert, who pointed out the difficulty of precision guidance for the egg drop.

Shifted the project's focus to a desert location with a new system inspired by Mars rover landing technology.

Designed a two-stage system with a non-moving fin rocket and a parachute deployment similar to Mars rover landings.

Created a redundant system with a simple beach ball drop as a backup plan for the egg's safe landing.

Conducted vacuum and temperature tests to ensure the egg wouldn't freeze and crack during the two-hour ascent to space.

Successfully launched the final design, which included a zero-pressure weather balloon capable of higher altitudes and heavier payloads.

The final launch faced a critical issue with the balloon self-destructing due to a缠线 problem, causing a premature descent.

Despite the balloon issue, the payload autonomously ejected and deployed the parachute, resulting in a successful egg landing.

Discovered both the primary payload and the redundant beach ball solution had successfully landed with uncracked eggs.

Emphasized the importance of learning from failures and applying resilience and problem-solving skills in engineering.

Introduced CrunchLabs Build Box, a monthly subscription service that teaches engineering principles through building toys.

Offered a unique opportunity for subscribers to visit CrunchLabs and build with the team as part of a special holiday promotion.

Transcripts

- This is space, and this is an egg

moments before I attempted the world's highest egg drop.

Now in an egg drop competition,

in case you never had the chance

to do it yourself in school,

the goal is to build a contraption

that can protect a raw egg from breaking

when dropped from the tallest height possible.

So my original plan was to drop an egg

in a contraption I built from the world's tallest building,

but humans are always building taller buildings.

So if I really wanted to future proof this record,

I realized I would need to go all the way to the top

and straight to outer space.

And when I started on this journey three years ago,

I knew if I could draw on my experience

of landing stuff on other planets,

I would be guaranteed the record.

But what I didn't know is this would be the most physically,

financially, and mentally draining video

I would ever attempt.

But first, let me just explain what I was thinking.

The plan was to clamp an egg to the front of a rocket,

then attach that rocket to a weather balloon

and take it up to space.

Once there, the weather balloon would release it,

and just by using gravity only,

the rocket would eventually accelerate past Mach One,

breaking the speed of sound,

and then it would autonomously adjust

the four fins on the back

to steer itself to the target location,

and then at 300 feet above the ground,

it would release the egg,

which would free fall onto a mattress

that we'd placed on the ground.

And that all seemed pretty straightforward.

So like any good engineers would,

we broke the problem down into smaller steps, starting first

with calculating the terminal velocity of an egg.

And by terminal velocity,

I mean that any object including humans,

have a maximum speed at which they fall

once the force of earth pulling you towards it

balances with the pushback force

from bumping into more and more air molecules

as you start to fall faster.

For humans that max speed is about 120 miles per hour.

And after doing some simple math for an egg,

it tops out at 75 miles per hour.

So to make sure the egg wouldn't break

if we dropped it onto a mattress at its terminal velocity,

we ran our first test.

And since we couldn't find a tall enough building

whose lawyers would agree

to let us throw an egg off the side and onto a mattress,

we had to improvise a bit.

- 83.

- Yes, check the egg, no cracks.

So our mattress will protect an egg

even if it's traveling faster than its terminal velocity.

That's a good start.

The next step in our DIY space program

was to head back to my friends

in the small farming town of Gridley, California,

which is the place where he broke

the elephant toothpaste world record,

where the plan was to set out a target mattress

for the egg to land on in the middle of a field

with a little bit of margin built in just in case.

- All right, so we've got the smoke charge back here

so that as we're like coming down from the sky,

we wanna be able to pick it out.

This is the computer.

Here's the fins.

- This, by the way, is Joe,

and he has a fascinating channel called BPS Space.

And what makes him especially cool is he didn't go to school

for any kind of engineering degree.

He's all self-taught,

and recently even landed a launched rocket SpaceX style

after seven years of trying.

Joe was in charge of tracking and guiding the rocket

to the mattress using these movable tail fins.

Whereas I was in charge of the payload.

In other words,

how we would keep the egg from freezing on the way up

in a little oven with heaters,

which would break away before we dropped,

along with the the mechanisms to release the egg itself.

Release the egg!

And the purpose of this first trip to Gridley

was a flight characterization test.

Basically before we spent all the time and money

taking the balloon all the way up to space,

we were here just to do a low altitude test at 10,000 feet

just to prove to ourselves we could steer the rocket

using the fins.

We're setting all sorts of world records out here.

World's largest mattress, fastest egg.

- [Joe] Yep.

- Tallest egg drop.

What could possibly go wrong besides like 4,000 things?

And so with everything more or less in place

and ready to go, all we needed now was an official egg,

which thankfully Gridley has in abundance.

Hi.

I'm sorry.

This is terrifying. (chicken squawking)

Okay, okay.

Okay, nope, nope, nope.

Hey.

(chicken squawking)

The precious egg.

In the history of our universe,

this is the first chicken that's ever laid an egg

that will go faster than the speed of sound,

supersonic Mach One.

Thank you. (chicken squawking)

I'm sorry, I'm leaving.

Congratulations.

So the next morning we got up at 4:00 AM

when the winds would be the most calm

to run through all our final pre-launch preparations.

Loading up our lovely egg.

Including the last minute decision

to add a metallic streamer to the back of the rocket

to make it easier to visually track.

- We've got redundancy all over the place here.

We've got redundant leads, redundant igniters.

Mark has two servos on the fairing.

No dumb failures.

- And that's exactly when we had our first dumb failure.

All right. (Mark screaming)

- [Joe] The GPS is mad.

- Ah, we gotta scrub the launch.

We were just walking back,

I hear the egg go ploop, and it pooped it out.

And scrubbing the launch meant

we unfortunately had to release

all the helium out of the balloon,

which is an opportunity I'm not gonna let just pass on by.

Hello, wow, that's so cool! (all laughing)

And back at home base,

we ran some tests that confirmed our hypothesis

that since the GPS unit was right at the back of the rocket,

the last minute edition of the metallic streamer

was interfering with the GPS signal.

And that messed up the rocket's math

in calculating its speed.

So it thought it was time to release the egg.

So early the next morning, we were back at it

with a few modifications.

The most important being

swapping the metallic tracking streamer

with one made from plastic.

The good news is there's hardly any wind today.

Bad news, it's about 20 degrees colder,

which means our mattresses are kind of frozen.

Nevertheless, we pushed forward.

Don't trip, Mark.

As I very carefully delivered the rockets

to the new balloon launch site.

- Send it.

- [Mark] Send it, baby.

We'll send it.

(dramatic music)

- It's happening.

- Should we see it?

Oh, yeah, yeah, I see it, I see it, I see it.

(Mark laughing)

(dramatic music)

- Oh, there it is.

- [Mark] And while the whole thing looked really cool.

- [Joe] So we might be in trouble.

We quickly realized the balloon was rising

at a slower rate than we anticipated.

We're already south, and we're only halfway up.

Which totally threw off the predicted trajectory.

And so after a few more minutes,

we decided to manually drop the rocket because we were

already way too far off course

for the rocket to make up the lateral distance

to the mattress using just the fins and gravity.

Three, two, one, clicked.

(wind rushing)

- Oh boy, that's not good.

- And that's when we encountered

the second problem of the day

as the fins actively forced the rocket

into an uncontrolled death spiral.

Altitude is 1400 coming down fast.

(rocket crashing)

- Well, it landed somewhere.

- Check the mattress just in case.

And since we have the GPS coordinates of the rocket,

we headed out to track it down.

The real question is what's the status of the egg.

- Mark, I think I might have some bad news for you.

- At which point we stumbled on an entire field

of sitting birds, which is another opportunity

I'm not gonna let just pass on by.

- [Joe] That's a chute man.

- [Mark] Is that a chute?

- [Joe] There's no egg.

- The egg did release.

The fact that this is out means the egg did come out,

so that's good.

But despite that silver lining,

the movable fins seemed to be actually forcing the rocket

into that tailspin,

which was surprising because Joe had definitely run through

a lot of analysis and testing before coming here.

So after conducting a thorough review of the footage

and firmware, he was able to locate and fix

a single rogue negative sign in the code

that seemed to be causing all the control issues,

which meant we were ready to give this one final try.

We had run out of spare parts and spare weather balloons,

so regardless of outcome, this would be the final attempt.

If we couldn't land the egg on a mattress

from 10,000 feet up,

we wouldn't have any hope of pulling it off,

coming all the way down from space.

Phenomenal.

That's nerdy space talk

for everything is exactly as expected.

I'm standing in the middle of the world's largest mattress

where hopefully the egg will be landing in like 45 minutes.

Otherwise, we're pivoting,

and my new video's world's largest mattress.

- So I'm arming the rocket right now.

- The last step.

All right, old girl, you're in for a ride.

- [All] Three, two, one.

- [Mark] Let her ride, baby.

Yee haw!

(upbeat music)

- [Joe] Looking good so far, we're at 500 meters.

- [Mark] Now in order for the balloon

to hit the target mattress for each launch,

we'd started from different spots around Gridley,

which raises an interesting question

maybe you've wondered yourself,

how do big balloons like hot air balloons steer themselves

or I guess even just know where they're going to land?

And the answer is computers know the wind direction

and speed at every height as you go up.

So on a given day,

if these are the predicted wind directions and speeds,

we would need to launch here

to be directly above the mattress

when we got to 10,000 feet.

But how we know all this information is the fascinating part

because every day it's someone's job

to launch two balloons like this into the sky

at noon and midnight London time.

But this is done in over a thousand locations

all around the world at those same two exact moments.

And these balloons all have something

called a radiosonde attached to them

that measures things like altitude, pressure,

temperature, and wind,

and then they transmit the information

back to the ground stations,

which gets fed into supercomputers.

And that's the reason weather and wind predictions

can be so accurate.

So 2000 of these massive weather balloons go up every day,

and then eventually pop and just land somewhere.

And since they're transmitting a signal,

some folks make a hobby

out of just trying to track 'em down.

- [Joe] How close are we to the drop point?

- [Mark] Balloon release?

- [Joe] Balloon release.

- That's it.

And this time we were releasing

right in the target drop zone,

which was good news on one hand,

but it raised some new challenges on the other.

- [Man] Where is it?

- [Man] Grab a chair!

- [Joe] 400.

- [Mark] Grab a chair. (all laughing)

See something?

- [Joe] Altitude 98 meters.

(Mark screaming)

I think we're down.

- Everyone okay?

That was exhilarating.

So we were much closer this time,

and we even managed to steer the rocket

in the right direction just slightly.

- [Joe] We found it.

- [Mark] Egg?

- No egg.

- [Mark] No egg?

- [Joe] Wait a minute. (Mark gasping)

- [Mark] it's the egg.

- [Joe] It's the egg.

- [Mark] Oh, did it crack?

- I mean, it's not not cracked.

- So after three failed attempts,

we still seemed pretty far off from where we needed to be,

which meant it was time for the ultimate phone a friend

with my buddy Adam Steltzner,

who you might recognize as this guy

from when we landed Curiosity on Mars.

- [Radio Operator] Touchdown confirmed.

We're safe on Mars.

- [Mark] He has a PhD from Caltech,

and he's also the Chief Engineer for Perseverance

and Mars sample return.

And so after explaining to Adam what we were trying to do,

he immediately spotted a fatal flaw in our brilliant plan.

- And you're doing terminal guidance

to something about the size of a house.

How are you gonna do that?

How do you do that?

I mean, I know how you physically do that.

How do you not get busted by the FAA?

- [Mark] In other words, we were basically attempting

to make a precision guided missile.

- Dude, there are thousands of people

who have done this before, and they are sworn by federal law

not to say a single (beep) word to you.

- [Mark] And to be fair, he raised a good point.

The people who could help us actually can't.

And even if we figured it out ourselves,

the ethics of just slapping that how to video up on YouTube

are questionable at best.

And so after a fruitful discussion with Adam.

- But we release at about the height,

and then we do a lobbing,

the thing you start to worry about is heating.

You might wanna start with a two-stage thing.

- [Mark] We decided to pivot

and instead of a precision guided egg landing

on a mattress in a small town,

we would set our sights

on a much more general egg landing target

by heading out to the desert.

But as part of of the pivot,

we completely scrapped our old design

and spent a couple months designing and building

a new system that borrowed heavily

from the Curiosity landing

because we figured if it could safely put a rover on Mars,

it could safely land an egg on Earth.

So we would still go to space on a weather balloon,

but this time the rocket would have fins that didn't move,

and it would be three times as long and four times as heavy

to guarantee we would get the egg

to supersonic speeds on the way down.

Then just like NASA separates the cruise stage

in the upper atmosphere and then uses arrow breaking

to dissipate a bunch of the energy and speed,

we would separate from the back half of the rocket

about halfway down

after we'd already broken the sound barrier.

And because the system now weighed much less,

it would naturally arrow break

and reduce its speed to the new lowered terminal velocity.

Then on Mars, the next step is the parachute deploy,

followed by the heat shield separation.

And we would follow in kind by launching our own parachute

and then release our own nose cone,

which would then expose our set of cushioning airbags,

as you can see here,

which we borrowed from the Spirit and Opportunity landings.

It was intentionally ambitious and extremely complicated,

but after a couple months

of complete redesigning and building,

we found ourselves in the desert

feeling cautiously optimistic.

And that was due in part to our lucky orange parachute

because when I left NASA,

my friends gave me this rectangular piece of nylon.

And for scale, that's the exact same rectangle here.

That's part of the parachute,

the Curiosity rover used to land.

So that piece of parachute

is actually one of the 80 rectangles you see here

as they were running the final tests

in the world's largest wind tunnel.

And so it only felt fitting that after some scribing,

a bit of cutting and a little sewing,

it had nobley repurposed itself for the new mission.

So as the sun went down back at the hotel,

we worked late into the night on final preparations.

This was an idea and a passion project

three years in the making.

And it took a staggering amount of work

even to get us to this point.

We had thought and prepared for so many things

that could go wrong.

And while I was feeling optimistic,

I knew at the end of the day it was the laws of physics

that would ultimately determine our fate.

So early the next morning,

the crew in charge of the balloon got to the launch site

to start filling it up.

And this balloon looks a little different than the others

because it's a zero pressure weather balloon.

The advantage these have over a typical weather balloon

is they can go higher up into space, carry more weight,

and they're open on the bottom,

which means they equalize to the pressure,

and it's impossible for them to pop.

So when you want it to come down,

you send a signal that will pull down on a string

that's sewn into the side of the balloon,

and it opens like a zipper and self-destructs.

The downside is they're incredibly lightweight

and so thin and delicate,

you have to be really careful and touch it with gloves.

And they were about an hour into filling it

with the four massive tanks of helium we had on hand

when we made a gut wrenching discovery.

Hey, dude, I got bad news.

We have to scrub,

start taking the helium out of the balloon.

- Launch scrubbed.

They had some issues

that I guess they can't resolve by today,

so we're sucking out the helium from the balloon

and trying for another day, so.

- So, no?

- No, yep.

- What are you talking about?

Are you serious?

- [Man] That's what it sounds like.

- [Mark] Now for context,

Joe was in charge of this part of the rocket,

and me and my team were in charge of all of this.

And while we'd each tested our individual systems

ad nauseum, it wasn't until that morning

that we were able to test

the integration of the two systems together.

And when we did, it became immediately clear to me

I had made a critical oversight.

So tension compression, this is great.

It's holding onto that thing fantastically.

The problem is this is so long and heavy,

as soon as it wiggles, it's going to want to bend.

Great tension compression.

But this happening at Mach Two is.

- That's not gonna work out.

- There's no other balloons in the world of this size

that we can get access to.

This is the only one for like another month.

We're trying to save this one

so we could hopefully reuse it,

But any slight little damage,

you touch it in the wrong spot,

and now that's an imperfection.

that may actually be a failure point for a future mission.

(dramatic music)

And this was an absolute low point for me.

The integration of two independent systems

is such a classic failure point in engineering.

I was crushed, I had missed this,

and financial concerns aside,

I felt like I had just let everyone down,

not just my team and the rest of the crew helping out,

but all the other folks,

some of whom drove six hours to come out and watch as well.

But that's the thing with failures.

They can sting like crazy,

but it's really just a process

to learn one more way, not to do a thing.

And so even as I sat there feeling pretty bad,

like any good engineer,

I was already coming up with a list

of all the things we were going to fix

to get back out here and try this dang thing one more time.

And this principle of resiliency

is something I think can be learned.

In fact, I believe this so much,

I started a toy company called CrunchLabs

with the express goal of helping kids

think like an engineer.

So with the Build Box, not only do you get a super fun toy

that you put together every month,

but you do it alongside me

while I teach you all the juicy physics of how it works.

We're right there in the trenches

building and succeeding together,

so the principles really sink in.

So if you're a kid and you're looking for something

to put at the top of your Christmas wishlist

or you wanna gift it to someone else,

so you can be the household hero,

just head to crunchlabs.com

or use the link in the video description.

Now as far as my plan to bounce back from my own failure,

we did four things to really get serious

and stack the dice in our favor for the final launch.

First of all, we fixed the connection point

with more of a sheath design

that could handle the bending moment,

and then then at the right altitude,

it would autonomously separate the two halves

with a black powder charge.

Second, we ran some vacuum and temperature tests

on a raw egg.

There's no air pressure,

and it's really, really cold in space.

So if you don't do something to protect the egg

for the two hours, it takes the balloon to get up to space.

It will freeze and crack the egg every time.

So we tested some heaters in our egg chamber

and proved that they keep the egg warm enough.

Third, we built redundancy into our system.

When NASA sends something to Mars,

they can't go there to fix it, so it just has to work.

And for that reason, a lot of critical systems have backups.

Even the part of my own hardware in Curiosity

that accepted a dirt sample from the arm

into the belly of the rover had two doors

that opened to the exact same place

in case one of the doors ever stopped working.

In our case redundancy meant

making a two foot wide custom beach ball

that we would stuff with a second egg

surrounded in packing materials.

With a 20 foot streamer on the back,

we would just drop like a rock.

It would be dead simple.

No parachutes to deploy,

no autonomous timing sequences and no fancy mechanisms.

This would be our redundant

yet I would argue kind of boring second chance opportunity

to land a safe egg.

And fourth and finally,

we went to a local crane yard to test both our solutions

at their respective terminal velocities.

Starting first with the beach ball.

Come on baby.

Oh, she's alive.

And after that we tested the final landing configuration

of the rocket.

Oh yeah, oh yeah.

By the way, the actual rover parachute held perfectly.

(lips smacking)

And so after all that,

we made the six hour trek back to the desert

for what I was really, really hoping would be the last time.

Hey guys.

After four failed attempts, we had learned so much,

which left me feeling cautiously optimistic.

And right outta the gate we got two bits

of really good news.

The first relates to

that super delicate zero pressure balloon we had to reuse

from the last launch

because there was no possible way to get a replacement,

just barely touching the balloon leaves it stressed

and creates a weak point for it to tear.

So I was obsessively checking the fish scale reading

that would give us the verdict.

The force reading is 37.6 kilograms of buoyancy force.

pulling this up.

Importantly, it's not changing.

If it were changing and going down,

that means we would have a leak.

But it's holding steady at 37.6.

That's a big deal.

And the second piece of good news

is my buddy and warm-blooded, good luck charm

Al Chen had arrived.

You might recognize Al as the other guy here with Adam,

and he's the one who actually said this.

- [Al] Touchdown confirmed we're safe on Mars.

(NASA Engineers cheering)

- If we were successful,

he'd be the one to make the official call.

And so after all the requisite last minute preparations

and three long years, here we go girl,

it was finally time for liftoff.

Ready?

Three, two, one.

(uplifting music)

And everything was looking good.

The balloon ascent rate was just what we predicted.

And that meant we for sure didn't have a leak,

and things were finally breaking our way.

Is that how it's supposed to look?

- [Joe] Yeah.

And it takes about two hours to get all the way up to space.

Whoa.

So once the balloon hit 30,000 feet,

we decided to hop in the car

so we could drive over to the predicted landing spot

about 45 minutes away.

So far it's all systems nominal.

Balloon's in the air.

It's ascending at the right rate.

We've passed some critical threshold points,

and we're still in the game.

Fifth time is the charm as they say.

And we eventually started outrunning the balloon in the car,

so we pulled over for a bit

as we reached an important altitude milestone

of 100,000 feet.

- [Man] I would say over a hundred, no leaks.

(crew cheering)

- Over a hundred.

That's 19 miles up and two and a half times higher

than a typical commercial plane flies.

And because the balloon expands so large as it rises,

we realized we could actually even spot it from the ground,

which was awesome.

Oh yeah, no, I see it, yeah.

Dude, that's totally it.

What wasn't awesome was when moments later,

Joe, while looking through the binoculars

made this gut wrenching observation.

- [Joe] It looked really big,

and then it looked really small.

- [Man] You saw it small.

- [Joe] Yeah, it like, it seems to be smaller.

- But it's just weird

that it would just completely disappear,

- [Mark] Which was followed by a devastating call

from the balloon tracking team.

- It dropped within the last two minutes.

- [Joe] That's 30,000 feet over the last, however.

So it's just popped.

- But these don't pop.

There's zero pressure.

And that's true.

They don't pop, but unbeknownst to us,

while we were looking at it from the ground,

the rocket and beach ball

had been spinning around and around relative to the balloon

for about 10 minutes.

This meant the cord that attaches to the string,

that self-destructs, the balloon

was getting wrapped around tighter and tighter

until it was so tight.

It pulled down on the balloon string

that is designed to essentially unzip and destroy itself.

And so before we even had the chance to release the rocket

and beach ball from the balloon,

it all started coming down in one big tangled heap

at 150 miles per hour,

which is way faster than the eggs could survive.

Well, let's start driving.

And as we drove over,

all I could think about

was how our fate would rest solely in the hands

of the redundant systems we'd put in place.

- We think it's probably about two miles up that way.

- [Mark] This was our Apollo 13 moment.

If our payload could autonomously jettison itself

from the tangled rocket balloon mess at 20,000 feet,

then it would be able to deploy our lucky orange parachute

and land the egg safely on its airbags.

And as we parked, we knew what was done was done.

There was nothing left to do,

but go on a hunt to find the wreckage and reveal our fate.

I see something orange that looks like a rover parachute.

Okay, we've got a thing.

And seeing the payload all by itself was a huge deal

because it meant it had actually autonomously ejected itself

from the mangled weather balloon mess at 20,000 feet.

And later when we checked the footage,

this is exactly what it confirmed.

And while that was incredible news,

I knew by this point not to get my hopes up.

I mean, so let's look through the window.

A little bit of dirt.

What do you see.

- Pretty good.

Definitely touched down, but.

- Touchdown confirmed whether or not we're safe on Earth

is TBD, right?

- Let's check it out to be sure.

- Oh man.

(upbeat music)

- Touchdown confirmed.

We're safe on earth.

- We're safe on earth.

That is a hot egg.

This was in space, and now it's on earth,

and it's not broken.

After that, we tracked down the beach ball,

which as far as I was concerned,

was just extra credit at this point.

This is the backup, the simple solution.

The true engineer's solution here.

- Oh my God, touchdown confirmed.

Look at that.

We're safe on earth.

- We are safe on earth.

Two for two, baby.

Two for two.

And as we walked away with two uncracked eggs in hand,

I was reminded that in life things rarely unfold

how we think they will.

But by learning from your failures,

coupled with a bit of tenacity,

us humans can accomplish a feat as incredible

as the world's smartest martian robots,

or as ridiculous as the world's tallest egg drop.

You know what would be cool?

Because like I hope you learned something

by watching this video,

but how much more would you have learned

if you were out there in the desert with me

helping to like troubleshoot and put the rocket together?

Well, I got great news for you

cause I got the next best thing,

and it's called the CrunchLabs Build Box.

It's a toy that gets delivered

right to your doorstep every month,

and then we build it together

while I teach you all the juicy physics

that make it work.

You're basically unlocking

your own personal Mark Rober video every month

where you learn a new engineering principle

that will have you not just building like an engineer,

but more importantly thinking like an engineer.

So you develop that resilience

and those problem solving skills.

And by the way, don't go slipping

on just how cool the toys we'll be building together

actually are. (Toy clicking)

Like this insanely accurate, rapid fire disc launcher

or this linkage powered drawing machine,

or this Rube Goldberg style catapult launcher

that will leave you feeling

like you just landed your own dang egg from space.

And I should mention that CrunchLabs is a real place.

It's where we design all these boxes,

and it's got a tennis ball cannon

and the world's longest Hot Wheels track

and a foam pit and a bunch of other cool inventions.

And each month when you open your box

that comes in the mail,

you have a chance to find the platinum ticket.

And if your box has it,

that means you and your family get to come out

and visit me and my team for a day,

and we'll build some cool stuff together.

So if you wanna embark on this yearlong journey with me

and make a sad Christmas tree like this,

a happy Christmas tree,

just go to Crunchlabs.com or use the link

in the video description

where we're giving away two months free

as a holiday special.