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 type 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 3 years ago, I knew if I could draw 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 1, breaking the speed of sound, and then it would autonomously adjust the 4 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 for bumping into more and more air molecules as you start to fall faster. For humans, that max speed is about a 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 hurl 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. It'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 Greeley, California, which is the place where we 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.

Alright. 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 7 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 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 are here just to do a low altitude test to 10,000 feet just to prove to ourselves we could steer the rocket using the fans.

We're setting all sorts of world records out here. World's largest mattress, fastest egg

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 an abundance. Why? I'm sorry.

This is terrifying.

Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. No. No. No. 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 spew sound, supersonic mach 1.

Thank you. Hey, I'm sorry. I'm leaving.

Congratulations.

So the next morning, we got up at 4 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 2 servos on the fairing.

There's enough.

No dumb failures.

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

The GPS is mad.

We gotta scrub the launch. We were just walking back. I gave the eggs all bloop and it pooped it out.