Engineer Drops Raw Egg From Space And Films Its Journey To Earth

The egg drop experiment is a staple of school physics lessons, illustrating concepts like gravity and shock resistance. YouTuber Mark Rober (@markrober) decided to take this experiment a step further by dropping an egg from space. After working on the ambitious project for three years, Rober shared the journey in a video posted in November 2022. The video has since gone viral, amassing over 106 million views.

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Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer turned YouTuber, has over 55 million subscribers. After working with NASA JPL and Apple, Rober set out to build a device that would prevent a raw egg from breaking when dropped from the highest possible height. He detailed this ambitious experiment in his viral video, “Egg drop from space.”

His original idea was to drop an egg from the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. “So my original plan was to drop an egg in a contraption that I would have built from the tallest building in the world,” but he realized that humans were continuing to build taller buildings, so he would have to go to space, where the egg would fall faster than the speed of sound. Little did he know, it would be the most “physically, financially and mentally exhausting video I would ever attempt.”

Representative image source: Pexels | K Senia Chemaya

Describing his plan in detail, 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 would release it and, using just gravity, the rocket would eventually accelerate, exceeding 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 placed on the ground. And then it all seemed pretty simple.”

With his team of engineers, they broke the task down into smaller steps, starting with calculating the egg’s ultimate velocity. Ultimate velocity (VT), according to ScienceDirect, is “the constant speed reached by a freely falling object when the gravitational force is equal to the drag and buoyancy forces acting on it, causing it to fall uniformly at that speed.” Mark revealed that for humans, this value is about 120 mph. He did some math to determine that for an egg, the VT would be 75 mph.

To test whether the egg would break at its ultimate speed, they conducted their first test using a mattress. The egg did not crack, he exclaimed excitedly. Then he traveled to the town of Gridley, California, where the plan was to place the target mattress so that the egg would land in the middle of the field. In the egg rocket to be launched, they integrated several complex mechanisms. One was an “oven with heaters,” which was to protect the egg from freezing so that it would not break during the journey. Then there was a mechanism to release the egg and a GPS tracker attached to the back of the rocket. Everything was ready for the highest egg drop. They had the world’s largest mattress and an egg that they retrieved from a pen in Gridley.

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The scientists began the exercise with what they called the “flight characterization test,” testing the rocket’s fins at a low altitude of 10,000 feet. Pre-launch preparations began early the next morning at the launch site. To speed the egg’s flight, they made a last-minute decision to add a metal streamer to the back of the rocket to make it easier to track visually. They also released helium from the weather balloon.

Representative image source: Pexels | Tolgaa Slanturk

As dramatic music played in the background, the footage showed a balloon rising into the air, as they tracked the balloon’s movement on their computers. During the flight, the fins suddenly pulled the rocket into an uncontrollable death spiral, causing the egg to plummet 420 meters. “Check the mattress,” one man said. They went to pick it up and check the egg’s condition. Unfortunately, the egg eventually broke.

Mark didn’t hesitate to ask his friend Adam Stelzner, a Caltech PhD graduate who is also the lead engineer for NASA’s Perseverance rover, for advice. Stelzner spotted a bug in the code, which they fixed. “We would still be going to space in a weather balloon, but this time the rocket would have fins that wouldn’t move and it would be three times longer and four times heavier to ensure that we would get the egg to supersonic speeds during the descent,” Mark says in the video.

Continuing his explanation, he said: “Just like NASA separates the crew stage in the upper atmosphere and then uses surge braking to dissipate a lot of energy and velocity, we would separate the back half of the rocket halfway through after it had already broken the sound barrier and since it is now much lighter, it would naturally break up by mistake and reduce its speed to the new lower terminal velocity.”

Representative image source: Pexels | Edvin Richardson

Once again, they launched the rocket egg in a final attempt. Two hours after takeoff, twisted ropes became tangled around the mechanism designed to lower the balloon. The entire shuttle began hurtling through space at 150 miles per hour. Fortunately, the egg released from the balloon and landed on the mattress. Mark went forward and retrieved an egg that had not yet broken. His experiment was a success.