The Oceanic X Prize: Deep Sea for the Rest of Us?

by Jennifer Frazer on March 3, 2010

“This here’s a bottomless pit, baby. Two and a half miles, straight down.” — Catfish De Vries, The Abyss

One of my many dreams is to travel to the bottom of the ocean to see hydrothermal vent communities, bizarre abyssal creatures and methane seeps with my own eyes. I can’t believe I missed this when it came out, but that dream took one giant leap forward in January: The X Prize people (of first private spaceflight fame) have announced a prize for the first company to return humans twice to Challenger Deep, the deepest point on Earth — 35,761 feet down. That’s over six and a half miles. In that crushing water, the pressure is 15,750 pounds per square inch: over 1,000 times atmospheric pressure at sea level. The announcement was made 50 years to the day after the first — and still only — two people reached that spot and returned alive.

Above you see the Bathyscaphe Trieste, the first vessel to reach this spot, manned by Jacques Piccard and U.S. Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh on Jan. 23, 1960. An article in The Times of London announcing the X-Prize news describes the tense descent that, unlike Neil Armstrong’s famous approach, has gone largely unheralded by history.

On a test dive off the island of Guam two months before the dive, the glue holding the hull together failed after the Trieste had just set a new record at 5.4km. Metal bands were used to strengthen it, and dives continued. On the big day, water began dripping into the cabin, but Jacques Piccard and Captain Walsh carried on and the leak stopped. Then, at 9.5 km, a crash shook the bathyscaphe.

“In the past we had some very small external components fail and those events produced sharper sounds of implosions. This noise was much lower in pitch, as if something big had broken,” Captain Walsh told The Times this week.

The two men checked their instruments. All seemed fine, so they continued. But a porthole on one of the tubes used to access the cabin had cracked. They were not in immediate danger, but if the tiny window gave way they would die instantly. “We could see it bulging, being pushed inwards by the pressure of the sea,” Captain Walsh said.

You can read the rest over at The Times.

Though few people can recite the details of this dive or where they were when it happened the way most people know exactly what they did on July 20, 1969, the event and place have still crept into our culture. Auguste Piccard, father of Jacques and designer of the Bathyscaphe, and/or his brother Jean Felix inspired Gene Roddenberry to name his new starship captain Jean-Luc Picard. Challenger Deep itself is named after HMS Challenger, a sailing ship that led the first true oceanographic cruise of the world’s waters from 1872-76 that is still renowned in scientific circles, cataloguing 4,700 new species and taking the first soundings of the Deep that bears its name. The expedition also inspired the naming of one other landmark exploratory vehicle — the Space Shuttle Challenger.

Yet in spite of the significance of this step, people have never returned to Challenger Deep. According to the Times, Piccard and Walsh fully expected it to happen in a few years with a better-designed sub. Instead, 50 years have passed. Only two remotely operated vehicles have returned. The X-Prize people, with any luck, will soon fix that.

The Times expects ocean nuts and kajillionaires James Cameron of The Abyss, Titanic, and (I cringe to mention it) Avatar fame and Paul Allen of Microsoft to be contenders for the prize. And though they go with exploration and science on their mind, worthy ends by any measure, it bodes very well for me and any of you who’ve ever dreamed of exploring life in the deep.

Right now, reaching the deep ocean in person is excruciatingly expensive and limited to a few lucky scientists and an occasionally extremely lucky member of the press. Even if the immediate aim is research and exploration, a successful design could be developed commercially by one of these guys to take the rest of us to the ocean floor much as X-Prize-Winner SpaceShip Two (aka Richard Branson’s sexy new ride) will soon open the heavens to mere mortals. Well, mere mortals with 200 Large to spare. They say that fare might eventually come down to $10,000. I’d pay that to see any of this. Sir Richard thinks everyone should be able to experience space; I think everyone should be able to experience the ocean deep. I hope I’m not the only one.

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Sightseeing the Deep Sea
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