Ben Krasnow has created X-rays with a vacuum tube, combined avocados and high pressure nitrous oxide, and cooked up homemade astronaut ice cream all in the last year.

His newest YouTube demonstration, though, might be even more impressive — it’s literally rocket science.

The “Hacker Extraordinaire,” whose day job is at video-game company Valve, built a small hybrid rocket engine from an acrylic rod that can throttle and also shut off. It’s the latest engineering project from Krasnow, who has nearly 3 million video views and 13,659 subscribers on his YouTube channel.

This rocket engine project is already his most-viewed video at 342,190 views in just four days. Here’s his explanation of the rocket engine:

I built a small rocket engine for demonstration purposes. The engine is built from a 2″ diameter acrylic rod through which I drilled a 0.5″ hole. The oxygen at 80 psi or less is passed through the hole and then is forced through a convergent-divergent nozzle at the tail end. The nozzle’s throat is about 0.25″ and expands to 0.625″. I lit the engine by inserting a burning cotton swab (with wooden stick) while a small amount of oxygen was flowing. The acrylic catches fire very easily in a pure oxygen environment. The engine can be throttled and shut off completely, which is a major benefit to hybrid engine designs. Solid-fuel rockets cannot be throttled or shut off, which makes them difficult to control.

(Via VentureBeat)

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