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It's not uncommon for YouTuber and content creator Zac Alsop to set himself a formidable challenge. One look at his YouTube channel makes it clear that he dedicates himself to testing the boundaries of possibility — whether faking his way to the front row of London Fashion Week, going to Elon Musk's house to hand over a CV, or taking a donkey to a five-star hotel, Zac is always exploring the limits of what he can and cannot do.
After Zac and his friend Jay went viral in 2016 for blagging their way onto Manchester's Team GB Olympic parade float, they started a YouTube channel titled The Zac and Jay Show to chronicle their increasingly daring antics.
In the first year after the channel's conception, it amassed half a million followers — as of today, Zac and Jay's most popular video has over 30 million views. In 2021, however, the Zac and Jay Show became Zac's solo project, as Jay decided to take a break from posting on YouTube.
Zac has continued in the spirit of The Zac and Jay Show, sharing videos of himself sneaking into festivals, projecting insults onto the Houses of Parliament, and asking millionaires if he can swim in their pool, just to name a few. With an impressive 1.35 million subscribers, his audacity clearly pays off. But when every challenge is bigger than the last, where do you go next?
That's a question Zac had already answered when he came to us with a new project, and we were eager to find out what he had in mind.
The bottle flip challenge
The bottle flip rose to prominence in 2016, and is generally credited to then-teenager Mike Senatore who flipped a water bottle at his school's senior talent show. The video of Mike's bottle flip went viral, gaining an impressive 6 million views in just five months, and even more significantly, it made bottle flipping a viral craze.
Children everywhere drove teachers and parents crazy, flipping half-filled water bottles over and over again until they landed upright. World records were broken and broken again while people competed to be the quickest to flip a water bottle, to flip the most in a single minute, to flip as many as possible at once — the possibilities were endless. The trend has slowed down over the years, but we think it's time for bottle flipping to make a comeback.
Zac seems to be of the same opinion, and approached us at Sent Into Space after deciding that he wanted to attempt something never done before: landing a bottle flip from space. To carry out this world-first feat, Zac got in touch with us to ask what we thought of the idea. Of course, we were keen to take up the challenge, and together with Zac, we began looking at how we could pull off such an ambitious plan.
Zac came to our office to discuss the logistics of the plan. We wanted this to be an actual bottle flip, which meant that the bottle had to flip, drop, and land — ideally, the right way up. Zac would start the flip on the ground, activating motors on the craft to spin the bottle. Of course, dropping a bottle from over a hundred thousand feet above the Earth would not be very safe, so we decided that the bottle would flip into space, and continue to flip for the start of its descent, where it would drop from thousands of feet above our secure landing site.
In order for the bottle flip to land — or at least be in with a chance of doing so — we engineered a purpose-built bottle designed to land on its base. While this didn't guarantee that we could land the bottle flip, especially given the height we were dropping the bottle from, this certainly increased our chance of success.
The execution
Launch day arrived and our team headed to the launch site alongside Zac, his producer Molly, and his cameraman/editor Scott. Before long everything was in place and we were ready to go; all that was left to do now was flip the bottle.
Want to know how it went? You can find out by watching Zac's video:
We also sat down with Zac at the Sent Into Space office for the first instalment of SIS Stories — we talked aliens, his most dangerous video, and whether he'd marry Logan Paul. You can watch our video below:
It was great working with Zac on this project and we're always excited to take on a new challenge, so if you're interested in a space launch of your own, please get in touch with the Sent Into Space team to discuss your idea further.