6 months ago we launched our first ever V Prize. A competition dedicated to finding the greatest engineers on Earth …or the ones who get distracted easily and have too much time on their hands.

We know there are more prestigious prizes – like the Nobel Prize. And prizes with more extraordinary financial rewards – like the XPRIZE.

But the reality is these are out of reach for almost everyone. So entry into our inaugural V Prize was a little more straightforward.

We gave you 6 months to turn our Vollebak logo into a flying machine. And fly it somewhere cool. 

We knew our logo had decent flight potential as it took 50% of its design inspiration from Northrop Grumman’s B-2 Spirit – aka the Stealth Bomber. Plus we’d already tested it ourselves.

Our original flying logo was about 5ft long, 50cm high and 4.5ft wide. And we flew it over a farmer’s field in England. The test included one loop the loop, some curious flies, and a bumpy landing. All we asked you to do was beat it.

Deep inside Germany’s Black Forest industrial designer Jörg S took on the challenge, optimising for cool-alien-craft aesthetics over air safety.

Crafted from a chassis of intersecting frames, wooden pegs, and 3D-printed nylon tough enough to survive repeated impacts, he wrapped the final structure in a super-light mirror-chrome vinyl – the same material used to pimp Lamborghinis and suburban hatchbacks. For lift he hacked a drone kit with 1.8 kilos of thrust.

In-air stability was his biggest challenge – mainly as his design has the aerodynamics of a flying upside down bar stool. So his “secret aeronautical sauce” was cutting large vents in each ‘leg’ to create air flow. 

But the result – a large, otherworldly, chrome V drifting a little shakily over rolling hills and purple mountains – is absurdly beautiful. With the emphasis on absurd.

9,000 kilometres across the Atlantic, Shawn A decided to go higher than everyone else and send the Vollebak logo straight to the stratosphere.

…A logical, commendable, and very Vollebak choice.

In order to fly under the administrative radar of the FAA he had to keep his payload under 2kg. So he used a high altitude weather balloon, a Styrofoam logo, an Insta360 camera, a GPS beacon, and a sensor pack recording altitude, pressure, humidity, magnetic field and dew point.

Weather balloons are brilliantly simple. The higher they climb, the bigger they get. Air pressure drops. Helium expands. A balloon two metres across on the ground becomes an eight-metre sphere as it drifts into the stratosphere.

To retrieve your payload, your balloon needs to burst. The trick is to get it to 30km high before that happens. And that means carefully calibrating the weight of your payload, the lift power of your balloon, and its predicted ascent rate.

The sweet spot is between four and six metres per second. Go faster and the balloon expands too quickly, bursts early and creates wake turbulence along the way, playing havoc with your delicate payload. Too slow and you risk the balloon drifting on the prevailing winds and eventually reaching neutral buoyancy and drifting away for good.

Shawn also had to avoid his balloon drifting into the restricted airspace above Albuquerque Airport, north of his launch site, and the White Sands Missile Range to the south. Neither of whom would welcome an unidentified flying logo. 

His calculations worked. His balloon climbed through the troposphere and on into the upper stratosphere where temperatures drop below -40°C and the air pressure is less than 1%. And at roughly 30km (right on schedule) he got the shot of the Vollebak logo flying high above the Earth, before the balloon hit its elastic limit and exploded.

The next steps for the V Prize will of course fund far more noble initiatives eventually.

Our plan in order was always:

1) Make our logo fly.

2) Launch prizes for genuinely important things.

3) Save Earth.