Mark Rober's 47th Birthday Countdown

Mark Rober Timeline

About Mark Rober

A former NASA and Apple engineer, Rober turned elaborate projects, glitter-bomb packages, the world's largest Super Soaker, squirrel obstacle courses, into one of YouTube's most popular science channels. He helped launch the Team Trees and Team Seas fundraisers and founded the build-box company CrunchLabs.

The rover engineer with a Halloween side project

Rober spent nine years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, seven of them working on the Curiosity rover now driving around Mars. In October 2011 he strapped two iPads to his chest and back to create the illusion of a see-through torso for Halloween; the video pulled 1.5 million views in a single day. He kept his engineering day job, later designing products at Apple, while the channel grew into one of YouTube's biggest, now past 75 million subscribers.

Glitter, fart spray, and engineering justice

In December 2018, fed up with porch pirates, Rober built a bait package that blasted thieves with a spinning cloud of glitter and bursts of fart spray while hidden phones filmed their reactions. The video got 25 million views in one day and became an annual holiday tradition. He also holds the Guinness World Record for the largest Super Soaker: seven feet long, pressurized to 2,400 psi, firing water at 272 mph, fast enough to slice a watermelon in half.

Ninety million dollars of doing good

With MrBeast, Rober co-launched Team Trees in 2019, which raised $20 million to plant 20 million trees with the Arbor Day Foundation, then Team Seas in 2021, which topped $30 million to pull 30 million pounds of trash from oceans and rivers. In 2025 their TeamWater campaign rallied thousands of creators and passed $40 million for clean water with WaterAid, bringing the three drives past $90 million combined. His CrunchLabs build boxes, launched in 2022, get kids engineering at home.

Quick facts

• Born March 11, 1980, in Orange County, California
• Spent nine years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, seven of them on the Curiosity Mars rover
• His first video, a 2011 see-through iPad Halloween costume, hit 1.5 million views in a day
• Holds the Guinness World Record for the largest Super Soaker, seven feet long and firing water at 272 mph
• Co-launched Team Trees, Team Seas and TeamWater, which together raised over $90 million
• Founded the CrunchLabs build-box subscription in 2022 to teach kids engineering

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