Former NASA engineer was able to drop an egg from space without it breaking

Former NASA employee Mark Robert and his team, led by self-taught engineer Joe Bernard, managed to make a breakthrough: they dropped an egg on Earth from space – and it survived! Or rather, not from space, and not exactly dropped, and there are a number of questions about “survived,” but they did it nonetheless! After three years of trial and error and an unknown amount of money spent, not to mention the complete lack of any practical benefit from this event.

Raw chicken egg dropping competitions in various protective devices have long been a measure of engineering ingenuity, and the heights in this competition are already measured in tens of meters. But 100,000 feet is still an achievement, although this altitude is a very conventional boundary of space. The problem is that cheap weather balloons can’t go any higher, so Robert’s team had to improvise.

An unexpected difficulty was that at this altitude the egg freezes, which dramatically changes its physical properties. We had to invent a heating system not to distort the essence of the experiment. Further engineers added a parachute from scraps of nylon for the test parachutes of rovers, in passing they “borrowed” a test inflatable pillow for the Opportunity apparatus and some more high-tech little things from NASA’s storerooms.

In the end, everything nearly turned into a failure when it turned out that the egg was flying somewhere extremely far away from the planned landing point. Finding it proved to be a very difficult task, as the delicacy from space risked becoming a meal for the local fauna every second, and getting proof of a successful landing would not be possible. But now the engineers, emboldened by their success, are hungry for new heights – they want to conduct a similar experiment on Mars.