The “egg drop experiment” is a staple in school physics classes, illustrating concepts such as gravity and impact resistance. YouTuber Mark Rober (@markrober) decided to elevate this experiment by launching an egg from space. After working on this ambitious project for three years, Robert shared the journey in a video posted in November 2022. The video has since gone viral, amassing over 106 million views.
Mark Roeber, a former NASA engineer turned YouTuber, boasts over 55 million subscribers. Working with NASA JPL and Apple, Rober aimed to build a contraption that could keep a raw egg from breaking when dropped from as high a height as possible. He details this ambitious experiment in his viral video “Egg Falling from Space.”
His original idea was to launch an egg from the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. “My original plan was to drop an egg into a contraption I built from the tallest building in the world,” but then he realized that people kept building taller buildings, so he had to go all the way to outer space, where the egg would to fall faster than the speed of sound. Little did he know at first that it was the most “physically, financially, mentally, draining video he would ever attempt.”
Describing the details of his plan, he said: “The plan was to attach an egg to the front of a rocket, then attach that rocket to a weather balloon and take it into space. Once there, the weather balloon will release it, and using only gravity, the rocket will eventually accelerate, breaking the speed of sound, and then autonomously adjust the four fins on its back to head for the target location, and then on 300 feet above the ground it released the egg, which fell freely onto a mattress we placed on the ground. And then everything seemed quite clear.
Together with his team of engineers, they broke the task down into smaller steps, starting with calculating the final velocity of the egg. Terminal velocity (TV), according to ScienceDirect, is “the constant velocity attained by a falling object when the force of gravity equals the forces of drag and buoyancy acting on it, causing it to fall uniformly at that velocity.” Mark revealed that for humans this value is around 120 miles per hour. He did some math to determine that for an egg the TV would be 75 mph.
To check that the egg would not break at its terminal velocity, they performed their first test using a mattress. The egg didn’t crack, he exclaimed excitedly. He then visited the town of Gridley, California, where the plan was to set up a target mat to land the egg in the middle of a field. In the rocket egg that was to be launched, they built several complex mechanisms. One was an “oven with heaters” that was supposed to keep the egg from freezing so it wouldn’t crack during the trip. Then there was the egg release mechanism plus a GPS tracker attached to the back of the rocket. Everything was set up for the highest egg drop. They had the biggest mattress in the world and an egg they took out of a coop in Gridley.
They began the training with what they called a “flight characterization test” to test the rocket’s fins at a low altitude of 10,000 feet. Preparations for the launch began early the next morning at the launch pad. To increase the flight of the egg, they made a last-minute decision to add a metal strip to the back of the rocket to facilitate visual tracking. They also released helium from the weather balloon.
As dramatic music plays in the background, footage shows a balloon rising into the air as they track the balloon’s movement on their computer. During the flight, the fins suddenly spun the rocket into an uncontrollable death spiral, causing the egg to plummet 1,400 feet. “Check the mattress,” one man said. They headed out to track him down and check on the state of the egg. Unfortunately, the egg broke.
Undeterred, Mark sought advice from his friend Adam Stelzner, a Caltech PhD and also chief engineer of NASA’s Perseverance rover. Stelzner did notice a bug in the lines of code that they fixed. “We would still go into space with a weather balloon, but this time the rocket would have fins that don’t move and be three times longer and four times heavier to ensure we get the egg to supersonic speed on the way down,” Mark said in the video.
Continuing his explanation, he said: “Just like NASA separates the crew stage in the upper atmosphere and then uses a arrow stop to dissipate a bunch of energy and velocity, we will separate from the back half of the rocket about midway down, after as the bibme has already broken the sound barrier, and since this now weighs much less, it will naturally break and reduce its velocity to the new lower terminal velocity.”
They fired the egg rockets up once more in a last ditch effort. Within two hours of liftoff, several twisting ropes became entangled around the mechanism designed to bring down the balloon. The entire shuttle began hurtling through space at 150 miles per hour. Fortunately, the egg bounced off the sweeping balloon and landed on the mattress. Mark stepped forward and pulled out an egg that was still unbroken. His experiment was successful.
