An egg dropped from space didn't break. Viral video has over 24 million views

Mark Rober has over 23 million subscribers on YouTube. (Image credit: Screengrab from YouTube video by Mark Rober)

A former NASA engineer took an egg drop experiment, popular in schools in many parts of the world, to space. The goal was to protect a raw egg from breaking when dropped from the tallest height possible. Mark Rober’s original plan was to drop an egg from Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building.

But Rober, now a popular YouTuber with 23 million subscribers, realised that if he needed to future-proof his record, he needed to send the egg to outer space.

Explaining the process in a video, he said the plan was to clamp an egg to the front of a rocket, attach the rocket to a weather balloon and take it up to space. Once in space, the rocket would eventually break the speed of sound and autonomously adjust itself. At 300 feet above the ground, it would release the egg. Once the egg was dropped, it would free-fall into a mattress placed on the ground.

Rober’s initial plan failed and after several attempts, he, with the help of his friend and NASA engineer Adam Stelzner, managed to drop the egg successfully without breaking it.

In the video, Rober can be seen picking up the egg from the fallen rocket and confirming that it landed with no cracks. After kissing the egg, he said, “It was in space and now, it’s on earth. And it’s not broken.”

The video collected over 24 million views in nine days.

“What I didn’t know is that this would be the most physically, financially and mentally draining video I would ever attempt,” he said.