This is a golden time for anyone interested in the mysteries of the deep.
A new space race has broken out — in inner space this time, not outer. The goal is to be the first to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a 1600 mile-long subduction zone off the coast of New Guinea that boasts the deepest place on earth, a small valley at the southern end of the Trench called the Challenger Deep.
The Challenger Deep is somewhere between 6.78 and 6.85 miles below the surface. The exact number is one of the mysteries that these modern explorers hope to settle once and for all.
Calling it a race to be “first” is somewhat misleading. Two intrepid explorers, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, touched down in the Challenger Deep back in 1960, but the scientific value of their famous descent in the U.S. Navy bathyscaphe Trieste was compromised by the fact that a key spotlight was crushed by hydrostatic pressure on the way down. That, plus the silt that was stirred up when the vessel hit bottom, made photography — and even simple observation — all but impossible.
The modern submersibles in the race are tricked out with L.E.D. illumination panels, high-definition 3-D cameras, and robotic mechanisms capable of slurping up samples of flora and fauna and keeping them at extreme temperature and pressure during the ascent to the surface.
If that sounds like something from a science fiction movie, you’re on the right track. The current front-runner is James Cameron, the Hollywood director and producer who holds records of a different kind: the highest and second highest-grossing movies of all time, Avatar and Titanic.
Having conquered the film business, Cameron has turned his attention to real-world, rather than virtual, challenges. Even so, he has brought his experience as a showman to bear on the problem. His descent to the Challenger Deep, which he plans to undertake in the next few months, is a co-production with National Geographic, and will surely yield profitable film footage.
One of Cameron’s rivals in the race to the bottom is another colorful billionaire, Sir Richard Branson, who has made a career of chasing adventure records as a way of publicizing the Virgin brand.
Sir Richard is also the entrepreneur behind Virgin Galactic, which aims to become the first company to monetize space tourism. To that end, Virgin Galactic has commissioned sub-orbital vehicles from Burt Rutan, whose SpaceShipOne made the first manned private spaceflight in 2004. Sir Richard has even built the world’s first commercial spaceport, Spaceport America, in southern New Mexico.
Adventurers throughout history have relied on patrons, whether it be Christopher Columbus wooing the Spanish crown or NASA lobbying Congress for a piece of the federal budget. But Cameron and Branson represent a new breed: wealthy men — celebrities, too, by virtue of that wealth — investing their private fortunes in enterprises so complex and expensive that they were formerly the preserve of nation-states.
There’s one key difference, though: personal gain.
You could argue that America’s great national achievements of the 1960s, which included touching down in the Challenger Deep and putting a man on the moon, were skirmishes of the Cold War. President Kennedy made his famous challenge in 1961 — send a man to the moon and bring him back safely again by the end of the decade — as a direct response to the Soviet Union, which was ahead in the space race. A manned lunar landing would be a symbolic projection of American power into the Kremlin’s night sky.
But in 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped into the dust of the Sea of Tranquility, it was more than just a tactical victory over an earth-bound foe. It was a statement about the ingenuity and creativity our civilization. The achievement belonged to the American people.
These days, America seems to have passed the torch of space exploration to countries like China and India, who are willing to invest hugely in the battle for international prestige. Our investments are elsewhere, primarily in war-making. We’ve left it to a billionaire — and a foreign one, at that — to spearhead the construction of our first spaceport. (Although the tax-payers of New Mexico are largely footing the bill!)
Private enterprise certainly has its place. I was thrilled in 2004 when Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne won the Ansari X-Prize. A visionary entrepreneur with a tiny team of engineers building a rocket on a shoestring budget? What’s more American than that?
But we should remember that NASA was, and is, about the science, not about profits, or movies, or celebrity – although the agency’s accomplishments led indirectly to all of those things.
We watched the many heart-stopping “firsts” of the Apollo missions as proud co-owners of the enterprise, having provided the resources through our tax dollars.
In the future, we may have to buy a ticket to see them.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 15 March 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
