Its Brutal to Get to the Oceans Depths. This Minisub Will Take You There

[Judi Lynn]

Rush in Cyclops 1 at OceanGate’s headquarters in Everett, Wash. PHOTOGRAPHER: BALAZS GARDI FOR BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK


Only four vessels can reach 3,000 meters, and they’re all owned by governments. Stockton Rush is building a private minisub with modified PlayStation controllers and cockpit tablets straight out of Star Trek.

By Josh Dean September 7, 2017, 5:00 AM CDT

For years upon years, Stockton Rush dreamed of leaving this earthly plane. “I wanted to be an astronaut,” says the man with the satin pilot’s jacket and the lustrous silvery mane, speaking at New York City’s Explorers Club, one of the few places where a guest might really encounter someone who’s exited our planet’s atmosphere. Rush learned to fly as a teenager specifically for that purpose, but he became disillusioned with the narrow scope of manned space exploration. He wanted to go far and find new worlds. “I eventually realized I wasn’t going to get to Jupiter or Mars,” he says. Which was OK, because Rush found a new and even more mysterious universe to explore. “I realized that all the cool stuff I thought was out there is actually underwater,” he says, then begins clicking through slides of creatures from the extreme deep. These are the fish of nightmares and sci-fi films: They have huge eyes or no eyes, spiny protuberances, enormous teeth, exoskeletons. “Here’s the creature from Alien,” he says, showing a slide from the film, and then, click—something in our oceans that looks a heckuva lot like the creature from Alien. Click. “Here’s the goblin shark.” Click. “And the barrel-eyed fish, one of my favorites. It was brought up in nets over the years, but until someone saw it underwater, we didn’t know that its eyes rotate up inside its gelatinous skull.”

There’s no better place to pitch audacity than the Explorers Club, and Rush has come to New York to raise awareness of his quest to reignite curiosity about the abyss. The 55-year-old Seattle native has spent much of the past decade drumming up support for deep-sea exploration, and he’s found people mostly uninterested—or at least wary. Rush longs to shine lights into the dark realms of the ocean, to 3D-map ancient wrecks, to study the bizarre ecosystem of hydrothermal vents, and to see the barrel-eyed fish in its element, but he keeps running into the same problem: There’s no good way to get down there and do any of that.

Small, robust, deep-diving submarines known as submersibles are the spaceships of the deep, and they’re in preciously short supply. “I didn’t understand why there were only a few submersibles in the world that could go to the average depth of the ocean,” Rush says. That’s about 3,800 meters (12,500 feet)—or so we think. The ocean floor is only crudely mapped. We know it less well than we know the surface of the moon.

Approximately half of the ocean is at least 3,000 meters deep, and there are four active vessels capable of getting there, each owned and operated by a national government and not available to the private sector: France’s Nautile (which can dive to 6,000 meters), Japan’s Shinkai (6,500 meters), China’s Jiaolong (the newest and deepest diving, capable of 7,500 meters), and the U.S.’s Alvin (4,500 meters and best known for helping to find the wreck of the RMS Titanic). “A couple of years ago, Alvin celebrated his 50th birthday,” Rush says with a smirk, as an image of the rotund, almost cartoonish little sub pops up among the slides. “There are not many pieces of high-tech equipment that celebrate 50th birthdays.” Alvin has been “massively upgraded,” he says, “but it is an interesting statement on how much money has been invested, or not invested, in submersibles.”

More:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-09-07/it-s-brutal-to-get-to-the-ocean-s-depths-this-minisub-will-take-you-there

[VMA131Marine]

1. Deepest diving submersible

Trieste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathyscaphe_Trieste

35,814 ft at the bottom of the Challenger Deep (Marianas Trench)