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