The New Tourism: Space and the Deep Ocean

by Katie O'Flaherty

Mars and the Deep Ocean. Poles apart, yet both overwhelmingly unexplored domains with so many unknowns. It is estimated that over 95% of the oceans of Earth are unexplored, going up to nearly 100% for the deepest regions of the ocean, yet the ocean makes up 95% of Earth’s living space. Pressure in the ocean increases by around 1 atm for every 10 metres descended (the pressure in the Earth’s atmosphere is 1 atm), with the deepest ‘layer’ of the sea being the ‘Hadalpelagic Zone’, which is only found in the deepest sea trenches, as it only exists below 6000 metres.

Mars is around 142 million miles from the sun, and when Earth and Mars are closest together in their orbits, they are 33.9 million miles apart. Travel from Earth to Mars would take around 9 months in transit, and after landing there would be a window to return 3 months after, with another 9 months for a return trip, thus the round trip to Mars would take 21 months. Not only this, but there are only windows to launch to Mars every 26 months, which makes planning exploratory trips to Mars a very long-term, logistics-intensive task.

Maven

Yet the expense and difficulty of exploring space, and more specifically Mars, has not deterred humankind from attempts to explore and understand, as proven by the 6 current exploration missions being run just by NASA to Mars, the most recent being the ‘Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution’ (MAVEN), which left Earth on the 18th November 2013 and arrived on Mars on the 21st September 2014. NASA has a further two missions planned for the near future: InSight, and the Mars 2020 Rover.

For undersea exploration, a mixture of ROVs (Remotely operated vehicles), HOVs (Human occupied vehicles), and AUVs (Autonomous underwater vehicles) are used. ROVs have to be constantly attached to a cable, operated from the ship, while AUVs have no cable, but instead have to be pre-programmed before descent. HROVs (a new breed of hybrid vehicles) can have either a surface operator, or drop the cable and be unmanned. Funding for deep sea exploration, however, is minuscule compared to that for space travel, with $32 million each year put towards ocean exploration, compared to the annual budget for NASA alone being $19 billion.

Human Underwater Vehicle

The reduced focus towards sea exploration has led to a far slower rate of improvement of understanding. The vikings started to explore the ocean in the 1st century, and many other races had begun to explore the surface of the seas before that, whereas the first human-made object to orbit the Earth was the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 in 1957, with the first human space flight being in 1961 with Yuri Gagarin. In 1934, ‘The Bathysphere’ reached a record distance of 3,028 ft, piloted by a well-known adventurer called Charles Beebe, and to date the deepest a modern submersible can reach is 20,000 ft below the surface, thus showing how the rate of exploration and advancement is drastically slower than that for space travel.

The risks involved, on the other hand, would suggest the pattern would be very much the other way, with no serious human injury due to deep sea exploration in the past 35 year, whereas there have been innumerable deaths in the field of space exploration, particularly during the rush to space during the Cold War, but also in more recent projects, such when Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity broke apart during a rocket powered test in 2014, and the co-pilot was tragically killed, and the pilot injured.

This did not deter any further attempts, though it naturally has caused a refinement on the safety and testing procedures in the field, with the aims of many companies, including Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, towards space tourism in the near future remaining as ambitious as ever. Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity (their second SpaceShipTwo vehicle) works by being carried aloft by a specialised aeroplane, dropped at an altitude of 15,000 metres, then boosting itself into sub-orbital space using its own motors. It is able to carry 6 passengers, each ticket costing around $250,000 USD, with over 600 people reportedly already putting down deposits for seats. Blue Orbit have their own plans for space exploration, with ambitious time frames of the company being a predicted year away from human manned flights, and a year and a half to two years away from tendered payloads, with the correct safety and licenses.

Deep-sea tourism is already a present industry, with companies having been taking customers to sunken ships and underwater oases since 2009. Oceangate already offer plenty of excursions for tourists, using their submersibles such as ‘Antipodes’ and ‘Cyclops 1’, but as of yet none can dive below 6,500 feet. They have plans to the ‘Cyclops 2’ to be able to take customers as deep as 15,000 feet, and this year have a planned expedition to take passengers to the wreck of the Titanic, 12,500 feet below the sea surface. Their craft are able to be used as transport and instruments for scientific analysis, as well as transport for tourists, which is a great advantage to the research community, as at present only 4 active submersibles can reach those depths, but are all government owned, thus cannot be used openly by the public. The design of the Cyclops 2, in order to withstand temperatures and pressures of the immense magnitudes at that depth, is exceptionally well thought out and advanced, with the cylinder being made up of 800 layers of carbon fibre, and being approximately 5” thick.

The potentials for the future in both fields of exploration and research are almost limitless, with ambitions of various people to inhabit both the deep regions of the ocean, and to colonise the far-off regions of space helping to motivate some truly astonishing advances, which could never have even been imagined a couple of hundred years ago.