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Egg Drop From Space — Transcript

by Mark Rober · 5,272 words · 755 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:00- This is space, and this is an egg
0:02moments before I attempted the world's highest egg drop.
0:05Now in an egg drop competition,
0:06in case you never had the chance
0:07to do it yourself in school,
0:09the goal is to build a contraption
0:10that can protect a raw egg from breaking
0:12when dropped from the tallest height possible.
0:14So my original plan was to drop an egg
0:16in a contraption I built from the world's tallest building,
0:19but humans are always building taller buildings.
0:21So if I really wanted to future proof this record,
0:24I realized I would need to go all the way to the top
0:26and straight to outer space.
0:28And when I started on this journey three years ago,
0:30I knew if I could draw on my experience
0:32of landing stuff on other planets,
0:34I would be guaranteed the record.
0:35But what I didn't know is this would be the most physically,
0:38financially, and mentally draining video
0:41I would ever attempt.
0:42But first, let me just explain what I was thinking.
0:44The plan was to clamp an egg to the front of a rocket,
0:47then attach that rocket to a weather balloon
0:49and take it up to space.
0:50Once there, the weather balloon would release it,
0:52and just by using gravity only,
0:54the rocket would eventually accelerate past Mach One,
0:57breaking the speed of sound,
0:58and then it would autonomously adjust
1:01the four fins on the back
1:02to steer itself to the target location,
1:03and then at 300 feet above the ground,
1:04it would release the egg,
1:06which would free fall onto a mattress
1:07that we'd placed on the ground.
1:09And that all seemed pretty straightforward.
1:11So like any good engineers would,
1:13we broke the problem down into smaller steps, starting first
1:16with calculating the terminal velocity of an egg.
1:19And by terminal velocity,
1:20I mean that any object including humans,
1:22have a maximum speed at which they fall
1:25once the force of earth pulling you towards it
1:27balances with the pushback force
1:28from bumping into more and more air molecules
1:30as you start to fall faster.
1:32For humans that max speed is about 120 miles per hour.
1:35And after doing some simple math for an egg,
1:37it tops out at 75 miles per hour.
1:39So to make sure the egg wouldn't break
1:41if we dropped it onto a mattress at its terminal velocity,
1:43we ran our first test.
1:44And since we couldn't find a tall enough building
1:46whose lawyers would agree
1:47to let us throw an egg off the side and onto a mattress,
1:50we had to improvise a bit.
1:54- 83.
1:57- Yes, check the egg, no cracks.
2:00So our mattress will protect an egg
2:02even if it's traveling faster than its terminal velocity.
2:06That's a good start.
2:08The next step in our DIY space program
2:10was to head back to my friends
2:12in the small farming town of Gridley, California,
2:14which is the place where he broke
2:15the elephant toothpaste world record,
2:16where the plan was to set out a target mattress
2:18for the egg to land on in the middle of a field
2:20with a little bit of margin built in just in case.
2:23- All right, so we've got the smoke charge back here
2:25so that as we're like coming down from the sky,
2:28we wanna be able to pick it out.
2:29This is the computer.
2:30Here's the fins.
2:31- This, by the way, is Joe,
2:33and he has a fascinating channel called BPS Space.
2:35And what makes him especially cool is he didn't go to school
2:38for any kind of engineering degree.
2:40He's all self-taught,
2:41and recently even landed a launched rocket SpaceX style
2:44after seven years of trying.
2:46Joe was in charge of tracking and guiding the rocket
2:48to the mattress using these movable tail fins.
2:51Whereas I was in charge of the payload.
2:52In other words,
2:54how we would keep the egg from freezing on the way up
2:55in a little oven with heaters,
2:56which would break away before we dropped,
2:58along with the the mechanisms to release the egg itself.
3:00Release the egg!
3:02And the purpose of this first trip to Gridley
3:04was a flight characterization test.
3:06Basically before we spent all the time and money
3:08taking the balloon all the way up to space,
3:10we were here just to do a low altitude test at 10,000 feet
3:13just to prove to ourselves we could steer the rocket
3:16using the fins.
3:17We're setting all sorts of world records out here.
3:19World's largest mattress, fastest egg.
3:21- [Joe] Yep.
3:23- Tallest egg drop.
3:24What could possibly go wrong besides like 4,000 things?
3:28And so with everything more or less in place
3:30and ready to go, all we needed now was an official egg,
3:33which thankfully Gridley has in abundance.
3:36Hi.
3:37I'm sorry.
3:38This is terrifying. (chicken squawking)
3:41Okay, okay.
3:43Okay, nope, nope, nope.
3:45Hey.
3:47(chicken squawking)
3:50The precious egg.
3:52In the history of our universe,
3:53this is the first chicken that's ever laid an egg
3:57that will go faster than the speed of sound,
3:59supersonic Mach One.
4:01Thank you. (chicken squawking)
4:03I'm sorry, I'm leaving.
4:04Congratulations.
4:05So the next morning we got up at 4:00 AM
4:06when the winds would be the most calm
4:08to run through all our final pre-launch preparations.
4:11Loading up our lovely egg.
4:12Including the last minute decision
4:14to add a metallic streamer to the back of the rocket
4:16to make it easier to visually track.
4:18- We've got redundancy all over the place here.
4:20We've got redundant leads, redundant igniters.
4:22Mark has two servos on the fairing.
4:25No dumb failures.
4:26- And that's exactly when we had our first dumb failure.
4:29All right. (Mark screaming)
4:32- [Joe] The GPS is mad.
4:33- Ah, we gotta scrub the launch.
4:35We were just walking back,
4:36I hear the egg go ploop, and it pooped it out.
4:39And scrubbing the launch meant
4:40we unfortunately had to release
4:42all the helium out of the balloon,
4:44which is an opportunity I'm not gonna let just pass on by.
4:47Hello, wow, that's so cool! (all laughing)
4:50And back at home base,
4:51we ran some tests that confirmed our hypothesis
4:53that since the GPS unit was right at the back of the rocket,
4:56the last minute edition of the metallic streamer
4:58was interfering with the GPS signal.
5:00And that messed up the rocket's math
5:02in calculating its speed.
5:03So it thought it was time to release the egg.
5:05So early the next morning, we were back at it
5:07with a few modifications.
5:08The most important being
5:09swapping the metallic tracking streamer
5:11with one made from plastic.
5:13The good news is there's hardly any wind today.
5:16Bad news, it's about 20 degrees colder,
5:18which means our mattresses are kind of frozen.
5:21Nevertheless, we pushed forward.
5:23Don't trip, Mark.
5:25As I very carefully delivered the rockets
5:27to the new balloon launch site.
5:29- Send it.
5:30- [Mark] Send it, baby.
5:31We'll send it.
5:32(dramatic music)
5:40- It's happening.
5:42- Should we see it?
5:43Oh, yeah, yeah, I see it, I see it, I see it.
5:46(Mark laughing)
5:48(dramatic music)
5:50- Oh, there it is.
5:53- [Mark] And while the whole thing looked really cool.
5:54- [Joe] So we might be in trouble.
5:57We quickly realized the balloon was rising
5:59at a slower rate than we anticipated.
6:01We're already south, and we're only halfway up.
6:03Which totally threw off the predicted trajectory.
6:06And so after a few more minutes,
6:07we decided to manually drop the rocket because we were
6:10already way too far off course
6:11for the rocket to make up the lateral distance
6:13to the mattress using just the fins and gravity.
6:16Three, two, one, clicked.
6:18(wind rushing)
6:23- Oh boy, that's not good.
6:24- And that's when we encountered
6:25the second problem of the day
6:27as the fins actively forced the rocket
6:29into an uncontrolled death spiral.
6:31Altitude is 1400 coming down fast.
6:40(rocket crashing)
6:42- Well, it landed somewhere.
6:43- Check the mattress just in case.
6:45And since we have the GPS coordinates of the rocket,
6:47we headed out to track it down.
6:49The real question is what's the status of the egg.
6:52- Mark, I think I might have some bad news for you.
6:54- At which point we stumbled on an entire field
6:56of sitting birds, which is another opportunity
6:59I'm not gonna let just pass on by.
7:06- [Joe] That's a chute man.
7:09- [Mark] Is that a chute?
7:09- [Joe] There's no egg.
7:10- The egg did release.
7:11The fact that this is out means the egg did come out,
7:12so that's good.
7:13But despite that silver lining,
7:15the movable fins seemed to be actually forcing the rocket
7:17into that tailspin,
7:18which was surprising because Joe had definitely run through
7:21a lot of analysis and testing before coming here.
7:23So after conducting a thorough review of the footage
7:26and firmware, he was able to locate and fix
7:28a single rogue negative sign in the code
7:31that seemed to be causing all the control issues,
7:33which meant we were ready to give this one final try.
7:37We had run out of spare parts and spare weather balloons,
7:40so regardless of outcome, this would be the final attempt.
7:43If we couldn't land the egg on a mattress
7:45from 10,000 feet up,
7:47we wouldn't have any hope of pulling it off,
7:49coming all the way down from space.
7:51Phenomenal.
7:52That's nerdy space talk
7:53for everything is exactly as expected.
7:56I'm standing in the middle of the world's largest mattress
8:00where hopefully the egg will be landing in like 45 minutes.
8:05Otherwise, we're pivoting,
8:06and my new video's world's largest mattress.
8:10- So I'm arming the rocket right now.
8:12- The last step.
8:14All right, old girl, you're in for a ride.
8:16- [All] Three, two, one.
8:19- [Mark] Let her ride, baby.
8:21Yee haw!
8:23(upbeat music)
8:24- [Joe] Looking good so far, we're at 500 meters.
8:27- [Mark] Now in order for the balloon
8:28to hit the target mattress for each launch,
8:30we'd started from different spots around Gridley,
8:32which raises an interesting question
8:34maybe you've wondered yourself,
8:35how do big balloons like hot air balloons steer themselves
8:39or I guess even just know where they're going to land?
8:41And the answer is computers know the wind direction
8:44and speed at every height as you go up.
8:46So on a given day,
8:47if these are the predicted wind directions and speeds,
8:49we would need to launch here
8:51to be directly above the mattress
8:52when we got to 10,000 feet.
8:54But how we know all this information is the fascinating part
8:56because every day it's someone's job
8:59to launch two balloons like this into the sky
9:01at noon and midnight London time.
9:04But this is done in over a thousand locations
9:07all around the world at those same two exact moments.
9:10And these balloons all have something
9:12called a radiosonde attached to them
9:14that measures things like altitude, pressure,
9:15temperature, and wind,
9:17and then they transmit the information
9:18back to the ground stations,
9:20which gets fed into supercomputers.
9:22And that's the reason weather and wind predictions
9:24can be so accurate.
9:25So 2000 of these massive weather balloons go up every day,
9:29and then eventually pop and just land somewhere.
9:31And since they're transmitting a signal,
9:33some folks make a hobby
9:34out of just trying to track 'em down.
9:36- [Joe] How close are we to the drop point?
9:38- [Mark] Balloon release?
9:39- [Joe] Balloon release.
9:40- That's it.
9:42And this time we were releasing
9:43right in the target drop zone,
9:44which was good news on one hand,
9:45but it raised some new challenges on the other.
9:48- [Man] Where is it?
9:51- [Man] Grab a chair!
9:55- [Joe] 400.
9:56- [Mark] Grab a chair. (all laughing)
9:59See something?
10:03- [Joe] Altitude 98 meters.
10:06(Mark screaming)
10:09I think we're down.
10:11- Everyone okay?
10:13That was exhilarating.
10:15So we were much closer this time,
10:17and we even managed to steer the rocket
10:18in the right direction just slightly.
10:20- [Joe] We found it.
10:24- [Mark] Egg?
10:25- No egg.
10:26- [Mark] No egg?
10:27- [Joe] Wait a minute. (Mark gasping)
10:28- [Mark] it's the egg.
10:30- [Joe] It's the egg.
10:31- [Mark] Oh, did it crack?
10:32- I mean, it's not not cracked.
10:33- So after three failed attempts,
10:35we still seemed pretty far off from where we needed to be,
10:38which meant it was time for the ultimate phone a friend
10:40with my buddy Adam Steltzner,
10:41who you might recognize as this guy
10:43from when we landed Curiosity on Mars.
10:45- [Radio Operator] Touchdown confirmed.
10:47We're safe on Mars.
10:48- [Mark] He has a PhD from Caltech,
10:49and he's also the Chief Engineer for Perseverance
10:52and Mars sample return.
10:54And so after explaining to Adam what we were trying to do,
10:56he immediately spotted a fatal flaw in our brilliant plan.
11:00- And you're doing terminal guidance
11:01to something about the size of a house.
11:04How are you gonna do that?
11:05How do you do that?
11:06I mean, I know how you physically do that.
11:09How do you not get busted by the FAA?
11:11- [Mark] In other words, we were basically attempting
11:13to make a precision guided missile.
11:15- Dude, there are thousands of people
11:16who have done this before, and they are sworn by federal law
11:19not to say a single (beep) word to you.
11:22- [Mark] And to be fair, he raised a good point.
11:24The people who could help us actually can't.
11:27And even if we figured it out ourselves,
11:28the ethics of just slapping that how to video up on YouTube
11:32are questionable at best.
11:33And so after a fruitful discussion with Adam.
11:35- But we release at about the height,
11:38and then we do a lobbing,
11:39the thing you start to worry about is heating.
11:41You might wanna start with a two-stage thing.
11:43- [Mark] We decided to pivot
11:44and instead of a precision guided egg landing
11:46on a mattress in a small town,
11:48we would set our sights
11:48on a much more general egg landing target
11:51by heading out to the desert.
11:52But as part of of the pivot,
11:53we completely scrapped our old design
11:55and spent a couple months designing and building
11:57a new system that borrowed heavily
11:59from the Curiosity landing
12:01because we figured if it could safely put a rover on Mars,
12:03it could safely land an egg on Earth.
12:05So we would still go to space on a weather balloon,
12:07but this time the rocket would have fins that didn't move,
12:09and it would be three times as long and four times as heavy
12:13to guarantee we would get the egg
12:14to supersonic speeds on the way down.
12:16Then just like NASA separates the cruise stage
12:18in the upper atmosphere and then uses arrow breaking
12:21to dissipate a bunch of the energy and speed,
12:23we would separate from the back half of the rocket
12:25about halfway down
12:26after we'd already broken the sound barrier.
12:28And because the system now weighed much less,
12:30it would naturally arrow break
12:32and reduce its speed to the new lowered terminal velocity.
12:35Then on Mars, the next step is the parachute deploy,
12:38followed by the heat shield separation.
12:40And we would follow in kind by launching our own parachute
12:43and then release our own nose cone,
12:45which would then expose our set of cushioning airbags,
12:48as you can see here,
12:50which we borrowed from the Spirit and Opportunity landings.
12:53It was intentionally ambitious and extremely complicated,
12:56but after a couple months
12:57of complete redesigning and building,
12:59we found ourselves in the desert
13:01feeling cautiously optimistic.
13:03And that was due in part to our lucky orange parachute
13:06because when I left NASA,
13:07my friends gave me this rectangular piece of nylon.
13:09And for scale, that's the exact same rectangle here.
13:12That's part of the parachute,
13:13the Curiosity rover used to land.
13:15So that piece of parachute
13:17is actually one of the 80 rectangles you see here
13:19as they were running the final tests
13:21in the world's largest wind tunnel.
13:23And so it only felt fitting that after some scribing,
13:26a bit of cutting and a little sewing,
13:29it had nobley repurposed itself for the new mission.
13:32So as the sun went down back at the hotel,
13:34we worked late into the night on final preparations.
13:37This was an idea and a passion project
13:40three years in the making.
13:42And it took a staggering amount of work
13:44even to get us to this point.
13:46We had thought and prepared for so many things
13:49that could go wrong.
13:50And while I was feeling optimistic,
13:51I knew at the end of the day it was the laws of physics
13:54that would ultimately determine our fate.
13:58So early the next morning,
13:59the crew in charge of the balloon got to the launch site
14:02to start filling it up.
14:03And this balloon looks a little different than the others
14:05because it's a zero pressure weather balloon.
14:07The advantage these have over a typical weather balloon
14:09is they can go higher up into space, carry more weight,
14:12and they're open on the bottom,
14:14which means they equalize to the pressure,
14:16and it's impossible for them to pop.
14:18So when you want it to come down,
14:19you send a signal that will pull down on a string
14:21that's sewn into the side of the balloon,
14:23and it opens like a zipper and self-destructs.
14:25The downside is they're incredibly lightweight
14:28and so thin and delicate,
14:29you have to be really careful and touch it with gloves.
14:32And they were about an hour into filling it
14:33with the four massive tanks of helium we had on hand
14:36when we made a gut wrenching discovery.
14:43Hey, dude, I got bad news.
14:47We have to scrub,
14:48start taking the helium out of the balloon.
14:55- Launch scrubbed.
14:57They had some issues
14:59that I guess they can't resolve by today,
15:01so we're sucking out the helium from the balloon
15:06and trying for another day, so.
15:12- So, no?
15:13- No, yep.
15:14- What are you talking about?
15:16Are you serious?
15:17- [Man] That's what it sounds like.
15:18- [Mark] Now for context,
15:19Joe was in charge of this part of the rocket,
15:21and me and my team were in charge of all of this.
15:23And while we'd each tested our individual systems
15:26ad nauseum, it wasn't until that morning
15:29that we were able to test
15:30the integration of the two systems together.
15:32And when we did, it became immediately clear to me
15:35I had made a critical oversight.
15:37So tension compression, this is great.
15:40It's holding onto that thing fantastically.
15:43The problem is this is so long and heavy,
15:45as soon as it wiggles, it's going to want to bend.
15:48Great tension compression.
15:50But this happening at Mach Two is.
15:53- That's not gonna work out.
15:57- There's no other balloons in the world of this size
16:00that we can get access to.
16:01This is the only one for like another month.
16:04We're trying to save this one
16:05so we could hopefully reuse it,
16:06But any slight little damage,
16:08you touch it in the wrong spot,
16:10and now that's an imperfection.
16:12that may actually be a failure point for a future mission.
16:15(dramatic music)
16:17And this was an absolute low point for me.
16:19The integration of two independent systems
16:21is such a classic failure point in engineering.
16:24I was crushed, I had missed this,
16:27and financial concerns aside,
16:28I felt like I had just let everyone down,
16:31not just my team and the rest of the crew helping out,
16:34but all the other folks,
16:36some of whom drove six hours to come out and watch as well.
16:40But that's the thing with failures.
16:42They can sting like crazy,
16:44but it's really just a process
16:45to learn one more way, not to do a thing.
16:48And so even as I sat there feeling pretty bad,
16:51like any good engineer,
16:52I was already coming up with a list
16:54of all the things we were going to fix
16:56to get back out here and try this dang thing one more time.
17:00And this principle of resiliency
17:01is something I think can be learned.
17:03In fact, I believe this so much,
17:05I started a toy company called CrunchLabs
17:07with the express goal of helping kids
17:10think like an engineer.
17:11So with the Build Box, not only do you get a super fun toy
17:14that you put together every month,
17:15but you do it alongside me
17:16while I teach you all the juicy physics of how it works.
17:19We're right there in the trenches
17:21building and succeeding together,
17:23so the principles really sink in.
17:25So if you're a kid and you're looking for something
17:27to put at the top of your Christmas wishlist
17:29or you wanna gift it to someone else,
17:30so you can be the household hero,
17:32just head to crunchlabs.com
17:34or use the link in the video description.
17:36Now as far as my plan to bounce back from my own failure,
17:39we did four things to really get serious
17:41and stack the dice in our favor for the final launch.
17:44First of all, we fixed the connection point
17:46with more of a sheath design
17:47that could handle the bending moment,
17:48and then then at the right altitude,
17:51it would autonomously separate the two halves
17:52with a black powder charge.
17:53Second, we ran some vacuum and temperature tests
17:56on a raw egg.
17:57There's no air pressure,
17:58and it's really, really cold in space.
18:00So if you don't do something to protect the egg
18:02for the two hours, it takes the balloon to get up to space.
18:04It will freeze and crack the egg every time.
18:07So we tested some heaters in our egg chamber
18:09and proved that they keep the egg warm enough.
18:12Third, we built redundancy into our system.
18:14When NASA sends something to Mars,
18:16they can't go there to fix it, so it just has to work.
18:19And for that reason, a lot of critical systems have backups.
18:22Even the part of my own hardware in Curiosity
18:24that accepted a dirt sample from the arm
18:27into the belly of the rover had two doors
18:29that opened to the exact same place
18:31in case one of the doors ever stopped working.
18:34In our case redundancy meant
18:35making a two foot wide custom beach ball
18:37that we would stuff with a second egg
18:39surrounded in packing materials.
18:41With a 20 foot streamer on the back,
18:43we would just drop like a rock.
18:44It would be dead simple.
18:46No parachutes to deploy,
18:48no autonomous timing sequences and no fancy mechanisms.
18:51This would be our redundant
18:53yet I would argue kind of boring second chance opportunity
18:56to land a safe egg.
18:58And fourth and finally,
18:59we went to a local crane yard to test both our solutions
19:02at their respective terminal velocities.
19:04Starting first with the beach ball.
19:06Come on baby.
19:08Oh, she's alive.
19:12And after that we tested the final landing configuration
19:16of the rocket.
19:16Oh yeah, oh yeah.
19:20By the way, the actual rover parachute held perfectly.
19:23(lips smacking)
19:24And so after all that,
19:26we made the six hour trek back to the desert
19:28for what I was really, really hoping would be the last time.
19:31Hey guys.
19:33After four failed attempts, we had learned so much,
19:36which left me feeling cautiously optimistic.
19:39And right outta the gate we got two bits
19:41of really good news.
19:42The first relates to
19:42that super delicate zero pressure balloon we had to reuse
19:45from the last launch
19:46because there was no possible way to get a replacement,
19:49just barely touching the balloon leaves it stressed
19:51and creates a weak point for it to tear.
19:53So I was obsessively checking the fish scale reading
19:56that would give us the verdict.
19:58The force reading is 37.6 kilograms of buoyancy force.
20:03pulling this up.
20:04Importantly, it's not changing.
20:07If it were changing and going down,
20:08that means we would have a leak.
20:10But it's holding steady at 37.6.
20:13That's a big deal.
20:14And the second piece of good news
20:15is my buddy and warm-blooded, good luck charm
20:18Al Chen had arrived.
20:19You might recognize Al as the other guy here with Adam,
20:22and he's the one who actually said this.
20:24- [Al] Touchdown confirmed we're safe on Mars.
20:26(NASA Engineers cheering)
20:28- If we were successful,
20:29he'd be the one to make the official call.
20:31And so after all the requisite last minute preparations
20:34and three long years, here we go girl,
20:36it was finally time for liftoff.
20:40Ready?
20:41Three, two, one.
20:43(uplifting music)
20:53And everything was looking good.
20:55The balloon ascent rate was just what we predicted.
20:58And that meant we for sure didn't have a leak,
21:00and things were finally breaking our way.
21:03Is that how it's supposed to look?
21:05- [Joe] Yeah.
21:06And it takes about two hours to get all the way up to space.
21:08Whoa.
21:11So once the balloon hit 30,000 feet,
21:12we decided to hop in the car
21:13so we could drive over to the predicted landing spot
21:15about 45 minutes away.
21:17So far it's all systems nominal.
21:20Balloon's in the air.
21:21It's ascending at the right rate.
21:23We've passed some critical threshold points,
21:26and we're still in the game.
21:28Fifth time is the charm as they say.
21:30And we eventually started outrunning the balloon in the car,
21:33so we pulled over for a bit
21:34as we reached an important altitude milestone
21:37of 100,000 feet.
21:38- [Man] I would say over a hundred, no leaks.
21:41(crew cheering)
21:42- Over a hundred.
21:43That's 19 miles up and two and a half times higher
21:45than a typical commercial plane flies.
21:47And because the balloon expands so large as it rises,
21:49we realized we could actually even spot it from the ground,
21:53which was awesome.
21:54Oh yeah, no, I see it, yeah.
21:56Dude, that's totally it.
21:58What wasn't awesome was when moments later,
22:01Joe, while looking through the binoculars
22:03made this gut wrenching observation.
22:06- [Joe] It looked really big,
22:07and then it looked really small.
22:08- [Man] You saw it small.
22:09- [Joe] Yeah, it like, it seems to be smaller.
22:12- But it's just weird
22:12that it would just completely disappear,
22:14- [Mark] Which was followed by a devastating call
22:17from the balloon tracking team.
22:18- It dropped within the last two minutes.
22:20- [Joe] That's 30,000 feet over the last, however.
22:23So it's just popped.
22:24- But these don't pop.
22:25There's zero pressure.
22:27And that's true.
22:28They don't pop, but unbeknownst to us,
22:30while we were looking at it from the ground,
22:32the rocket and beach ball
22:33had been spinning around and around relative to the balloon
22:36for about 10 minutes.
22:37This meant the cord that attaches to the string,
22:40that self-destructs, the balloon
22:41was getting wrapped around tighter and tighter
22:43until it was so tight.
22:45It pulled down on the balloon string
22:47that is designed to essentially unzip and destroy itself.
22:51And so before we even had the chance to release the rocket
22:53and beach ball from the balloon,
22:54it all started coming down in one big tangled heap
22:57at 150 miles per hour,
22:59which is way faster than the eggs could survive.
23:03Well, let's start driving.
23:05And as we drove over,
23:06all I could think about
23:07was how our fate would rest solely in the hands
23:09of the redundant systems we'd put in place.
23:12- We think it's probably about two miles up that way.
23:17- [Mark] This was our Apollo 13 moment.
23:20If our payload could autonomously jettison itself
23:22from the tangled rocket balloon mess at 20,000 feet,
23:25then it would be able to deploy our lucky orange parachute
23:28and land the egg safely on its airbags.
23:30And as we parked, we knew what was done was done.
23:33There was nothing left to do,
23:34but go on a hunt to find the wreckage and reveal our fate.
23:39I see something orange that looks like a rover parachute.
23:44Okay, we've got a thing.
23:48And seeing the payload all by itself was a huge deal
23:50because it meant it had actually autonomously ejected itself
23:54from the mangled weather balloon mess at 20,000 feet.
23:57And later when we checked the footage,
23:59this is exactly what it confirmed.
24:01And while that was incredible news,
24:03I knew by this point not to get my hopes up.
24:05I mean, so let's look through the window.
24:07A little bit of dirt.
24:08What do you see.
24:10- Pretty good.
24:11Definitely touched down, but.
24:11- Touchdown confirmed whether or not we're safe on Earth
24:13is TBD, right?
24:14- Let's check it out to be sure.
24:15- Oh man.
24:17(upbeat music)
24:22- Touchdown confirmed.
24:24We're safe on earth.
24:24- We're safe on earth.
24:28That is a hot egg.
24:31This was in space, and now it's on earth,
24:33and it's not broken.
24:34After that, we tracked down the beach ball,
24:36which as far as I was concerned,
24:37was just extra credit at this point.
24:40This is the backup, the simple solution.
24:42The true engineer's solution here.
24:47- Oh my God, touchdown confirmed.
24:49Look at that.
24:50We're safe on earth.
24:50- We are safe on earth.
24:52Two for two, baby.
24:54Two for two.
24:56And as we walked away with two uncracked eggs in hand,
24:58I was reminded that in life things rarely unfold
25:01how we think they will.
25:03But by learning from your failures,
25:04coupled with a bit of tenacity,
25:06us humans can accomplish a feat as incredible
25:08as the world's smartest martian robots,
25:11or as ridiculous as the world's tallest egg drop.
25:15You know what would be cool?
25:17Because like I hope you learned something
25:19by watching this video,
25:20but how much more would you have learned
25:22if you were out there in the desert with me
25:24helping to like troubleshoot and put the rocket together?
25:27Well, I got great news for you
25:29cause I got the next best thing,
25:30and it's called the CrunchLabs Build Box.
25:34It's a toy that gets delivered
25:35right to your doorstep every month,
25:36and then we build it together
25:38while I teach you all the juicy physics
25:40that make it work.
25:40You're basically unlocking
25:42your own personal Mark Rober video every month
25:44where you learn a new engineering principle
25:46that will have you not just building like an engineer,
25:48but more importantly thinking like an engineer.
25:51So you develop that resilience
25:53and those problem solving skills.
25:55And by the way, don't go slipping
25:57on just how cool the toys we'll be building together
26:00actually are. (Toy clicking)
26:02Like this insanely accurate, rapid fire disc launcher
26:06or this linkage powered drawing machine,
26:08or this Rube Goldberg style catapult launcher
26:10that will leave you feeling
26:11like you just landed your own dang egg from space.
26:14And I should mention that CrunchLabs is a real place.
26:16It's where we design all these boxes,
26:18and it's got a tennis ball cannon
26:20and the world's longest Hot Wheels track
26:22and a foam pit and a bunch of other cool inventions.
26:25And each month when you open your box
26:27that comes in the mail,
26:28you have a chance to find the platinum ticket.
26:30And if your box has it,
26:31that means you and your family get to come out
26:33and visit me and my team for a day,
26:35and we'll build some cool stuff together.
26:37So if you wanna embark on this yearlong journey with me
26:39and make a sad Christmas tree like this,
26:41a happy Christmas tree,
26:43just go to Crunchlabs.com or use the link
26:46in the video description
26:47where we're giving away two months free
26:49as a holiday special.

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