This video is sponsored by Adobe Express.
This is a custom-built LEGO rollercoaster tied to a giant hydrogen balloon
being launched into space. If everything goes to plan,
in about 90 minutes the motors will turn on, giving our brave astronauts
the ride of their lives. But that’s a big ‘if'.
You see it started with this, the official LEGO space coaster.
It has to be pushed round by hand, but is nonetheless charming,
albeit with one major flaw: It’s not in space. And so an idea was born -
would it be possible to make an actual space coaster?
I mean, we’ve all seen the movie ‘Up', but would it work for real -
tying a giant balloon to an object and sending it to the stratosphere?
We’re gonna need a bigger balloon. But then could I even build a
rollercoaster that was reliable enough, or capable of surviving the
extreme conditions and forces? Well I figured the best place to start would
be to build LEGO’s existing rollercoasters, and see what I could learn from them
First there’s this red and white design, which I previously combined 10 of
to make one giant rollercoaster. Like most rides,
it uses a chain-based lift-hill, which works very reliably.
However the same can’t be said for the layout. The corner pieces are a common failure point,
flat and often killing the speed. And this long stretch of flat track
for the station sees a similar problem. In fact when I initially built it,
the ride wouldn’t even do a complete lap, with about five different frequent failure points.
Reading online, it seems to be a common problem, and frustratingly, it got less
and less reliable with time, until I couldn’t get it to work at all.
Then there’s the loop coaster, bold and radically different.
It physically lifts a piece of track up, before a giant drop,
two loops, and heading back to the start. Or at least that’s what’s supposed to happen.
It’s even less reliable than the first coaster, only working about half the time.
The lift is a huge failure point, with the two pieces of track often misaligning,
causing this to happen. The fact that I filmed it from so many different
angles shows just how prevalent this issue was. That said,
I appreciate the set’s ambition, and it introduces the downhill curve piece,
which really is a game-changer, meaning we can now turn
corners without losing speed. And just for fun,
if you move this piece like this and this piece like this,
you can combine the two versions, how cool is that?
Well until it fails. And that’s another failure point!
Obviously in space, I won’t be able to put it
back on track if it derails, or give it a little nudge if it gets stuck,
so I was suddenly faced with the overwhelmingly daunting task of building a rollercoaster
significantly more reliable than LEGO themselves. [Gulp]
Thankfully, I wouldn’t be alone.
Meet Dan, he’s been helping me with filming,
stop-motion and generally building stuff since the start of the year,
and he seems to really like waving. We’ll be designing the rollercoaster together,
but even then, we’re not just tying some LEGO to a
helium balloon and hoping for the best, there are actual professionals involved,
the space nerds. Their company is literally
called ‘Sent Into Space’, so whilst it’s our job to make a
consistently reliable LEGO rollercoaster, it’s theirs to launch it to the stratosphere.
We designed it first using any old pieces in any old colour,
so it looks ridiculous, but it also looks kinda cool.
We opted for lift hills instead of the wildly unreliable lift,
and avoided excessive flat sections, making frequent use of the downhill curves.
It’s as wide and tall as aerospace regulations allow,
and most importantly, it worked like a dream.
We had it running for over an hour, that’s about 250 laps,
and it only stopped because the motors eventually ran out of battery.
It’s kind of a shame there’s no loop, it was just too much of a failure point,
but otherwise I was delighted with it. Whether or not it would work
in space was another question, but for now, it was looking promising.
The next step then is to rebuild the whole thing with less erratic colours and pieces,
and hopefully make it a bit sturdier. This time I built a more tailored base,
and adopted the strut system from LEGO’s red and white design.
I then built upwards using white columns and crossbeams,
again like LEGO’s own, and opted for the loop coaster’s yellow track.
The end design looked simple, sleek and stunning, and again most importantly worked flawlessly,
since nothing had actually changed other than the colours and precise pieces used.
The next step was to name the ride and create some cool branding,
with the help of this video’s sponsor Adobe Express.
Adobe Express is a free to use all-in-one editor, where you can create anything from
logos, flyers and other graphics, to short videos for social media.
I’m gonna start by creating a logo for the rollercoaster,
and are you ready for this name, Stratos-Fear,
isn’t that genius! I matched the colour to the track,
added a flare effect, then found a cool picture of the
Earth included with Adobe Stock, which I cropped accordingly.
That was incredibly easy, and it’s available both in browser like this,
and as a mobile app, enabling you to quickly switch between the two,
plus they’ve recently added some amazing new features,
including realtime collaboration, and drag-and-drop video creation.
Try Adobe Express free now from the link in the description.
We now just had to hope the newly-named rollercoaster would survive the
four hour drive to the space headquarters. It did not.
Ah. So after quickly rebuilding,
it was over to the space nerds. They immediately suggested a number of changes.
Firstly they wanted to swap out the flimsy LEGO base for a custom carbon-fibre one.
They 3D-printed custom pieces, with LEGO connection points inside,
to hold each column in the perfect position. And from here,
well things took a sinister turn. I’m not proud to admit to you what happened next…
we broke, The Rule.
[thunder clap] Thou shalt not glue LEGO.
[haunting orchestral music] Finally Matt and Niall swapped
out the LEGO motors for their own, which had been tried and tested
at the extreme altitudes, and after mounting the cameras,
it was time for a test run. So this is now the final rollercoaster.
It’s all been glued together, we’ve got a 360 camera mounted here,
we’ve got a tiny run-cam there and one here as well,
to get like the close-up ride photo, the motors have all been swapped out
for ones they can remotely activate, and yeah, we’re ready for a test run,
it’s hanging from the ceiling which seems kinda scary,
but pretty soon it’s gonna be going a lot higher than this
It’s also a good point to introduce our two brave astronauts,
and by now you’re probably wondering… [‘Does It Come With A LEGO Frog’ Theme Song]
Of course, and he’s gonna be the first
ever LEGO frog to go to space. Anyway hanging it from the ceiling
like this might seem absurd, but it’s actually a great way of emulating
some of the forces that’ll be acting on it when it launches for real.
And that’s the whole reason we built two lift hills,
not only does the ride vehicle need enough gravitational potential energy to make it round,
it needs extra, to counteract any spinning, tilting, wind,
or whatever else nature might throw at it. And it worked quite well…
It was way more reliable than LEGO’s own, but whilst we avoided all of their issues,
we’d inadvertently created a new one: the ride vehicle sometimes derailed
and got stuck on the lift hills. I think it was something to do with
the new motor’s increased torque, but they 3D-printed some additional
grips for the underside of the cart, which now made it physically impossible to derail.
And just like that, it was ready.
All I needed to do now was design a ticket, and Adobe Express had over a
thousand templates to choose from. I selected one and set about customising.
When I was a kid, I would often make stuff like this for fun, make-believe tickets or maps or guides for
things that only existing in my imagination. And even now,
sure I didn’t have to design this ticket, but eight year old me would have been exuberant
to learn that the event it was for was very real. And in the morning,
it would be time to launch. Morning came, and I was both excited and terrified.
Everyone else had jobs to be getting on with, whether inflating the giant balloon,
or setting up the tracking system, but I was just walking round overthinking things.
It didn’t help that the cameras wouldn’t have a live feed -
we wouldn’t even know whether the rollercoaster had worked or not until it landed again,
and that wouldn’t be for another few hours. I just had to trust that the space
nerds knew what they were doing. And very soon,
it was time for lift-off. This is it.
[music] It was very surreal,
watching months of hard work float off into the sky until it was just a barely visible speck.
Wow. But there was no time for contemplation,
the race was on. It genuinely felt like we were in an action movie,
as we piled into the car and chased after the balloon.
Based on weather and wind data, they’d predicted a landing
site about 60 miles south, which they were constantly adjusting with
realtime GPS coordinates the closer we got. Surprisingly,
the balloon seemed to have crossed an international border,
having launched in Wales and now drifted into England,
and after what felt like forever, we finally had a landing site.
So we can see something orange up on the hill, I’ve got a feeling that could be it.
No way, we’ve found it.
As we parked up, my excitement levels were through the roof.
The rollercoaster is over there upright! So there’s the parachute,
ah look at that view in the background, I can hear the motors going.
And that’s when my heart sunk. Although the motors were still spinning,
and the cameras still recording, the ride vehicle was gone.
Something had gone very wrong. Let’s rewind a few hours.
Already, I couldn’t believe how magnificent this looked,
and the other two cameras albeit lower quality were looking just as impressive.
At slightly over a kilometre, the rollercoaster entered the clouds,
and shortly thereafter emerged into the most wonderful of blue skies.
From here it was plain sailing. Soon it passed 10km,
the cruising altitude of a passenger plane, and by 20,
it was really starting to look like what you’d call space.
I mean, technically the scientific definition of space is the Karman line,
a completely arbitrary point at 100km, but what do scientists know?
For dreamers like us, this is undeniably space,
and if you insist on being pedantic, firstly booooooo!
and secondly we can at least agree it’s the edge of the space.
Anyway, we’d now reached 24km, the altitude at which the
motors should be turning on, right about now.
[clears throat]. I said, right about now.
Yes! Oooh?
Noooo. Oooh?
Yessss! After a hesitant first lift hill,
it was actually working, a LEGO rollercoaster in space,
the culmination of so much work by so many people, and it was glorious!
I really wish I’d filmed our reaction on the ground when we first saw this footage,
it was loud cheers and high fives all round, it was the greatest.
And it worked near flawlessly, giving our brave astronauts and
astrofrog the ride of their lives, and capturing the most exhilarating ride photos.
All in all it managed 24 triumphant laps, the world’s highest and
world’s scariest rollercoaster, the Stratos-Fear in the stratosphere.
But all good things must sadly come to an end. It got stuck,
and if you look closely, the back cart somehow managed to derail.
Eventually it struggled to the top, but here it got really stuck.
In all fairness, it managed to bravely cling on,
and 20 minutes later the flight reached it’s peak altitude of 31km.
Normally with these launches, they just wait until the balloon
pops by itself due to pressure, but with this we wanted a less violent descent, so used what’s called a controlled cutdown.
At a certain altitude and location deemed safe, the balloon is mechanically released to
terminate the flight and begin the descent. And to start with, it wasn’t too violent.
But then things got really bad. At points the rollercoaster
was literally on it’s side, and I was suddenly very
glad we’d glued it together. But then somehow,
this happened. [unsettling slowed-down audio]
There was a particularly aggressive lurch, and the ride vehicle was
thrown from the rollercoaster, falling uncontrolledly back to earth.
Now I want to clarify, obviously we took every precaution possible
to ensure nothing would fall off like this. Everything underwent rigorous testing,
the rollercoaster itself was glued together and screwed down,
and like I mentioned earlier, extra grips were even added to the ride vehicle
which we thought made it physically impossible to derail.
Even still, they plan for scenarios like this just in case,
which is why we launched in the middle of nowhere, on a very specific day,
and with the wind moving in just the right direction,
all to ensure a safe flight path well away from built up areas.
And then on top of all of that, the falling ride vehicle would have
reached terminal velocity very quickly, it’s not like it just accelerated the whole way,
it would have been the same as simply dropping it from a three-storey building.
Regardless, it was very unfortunate and very unlucky,
but not nearly as dangerous or reckless as it probably seems.
We admittedly did kind of therefore litter, but Dan and I later went litter
picking to try and restore balance. Anyway the descent took about an hour,
and very soon it was back through the clouds, and into the familiar patchwork
quilt of English countryside. Luckily it managed to avoid
any rivers, mountains or trees, but gave this poor little
sheep the fright of its life. I bet no one will believe him when he
tells his friends what just happened. And you know the rest.
So despite not going entirely to plan, we’d successfully launched and
operated a LEGO rollercoaster in space. This was a real team effort,
so thank you to everyone involved, and of course Adobe Express
for funding this madness. I used it one last time to
create a frog missing poster. Try it free now with the link in the description.
