Plans of Richard Branson
It looks as if (for one man at least) space is far from the final frontier. Richard Branson has turned his attention to the seas, and is planning to take a mini submarine to the deepest point of each of the world’s five oceans.
It’s the first time anyone’s atttempted to do this, and Branson says he expects to set around 30 world records.
“With space long ago reached by man, and commercial spaceflight tantalisingly close, the last great challenge for humans is to reach and explore the depths of our planet’s oceans” – says Branson.
“The submarine will travel to the deepest trenches in our oceans and will allow its pilot not only to reach these depths but to explore for 10 kilometres on each of the dives.”
The Five Dives expedition will take two years, and will be made in what Branson claims is the world’s only submarine capable of taking a human being to such depths.
The Virgin Oceanic submarine is owned and operated by Chris Welsh and his company Deep Sub LLC, and will be a working research vessel carrying mounted and changeable pods on the wings. It will be capable of autonomous video recording and high-definition sonar recording, and will carry out various science experiments created by oceanographers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
- Richard Branson.
One of them owns a twin-engine airplane and a helicopter. The other? A fleet of spaceships.
Richard Branson (the billionaire adventurer) and Newport Beach real estate investor Chris Welsh unveiled a one-person submarine Tuesday that they said will be used to explore the deepest reaches of the world’s oceans.
The pair said they will begin later this year with the Mariana Trench, a 36.000-foot-deep valley that has not been visited by mankind since 1960, when a bulky, two-man submarine operated by the U.S. Navy made the voyage. At least two robot-controlled subs have made the trip since.
Although the U.S. government no longer has much interest in going to such depths, Welsh said he spent about $1 million of his own money on the project before catching the interest (and financial clout) of Branson, the founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways and Virgin Galactic.
“I can’t afford to get to the finish line on my own dollar” – Welsh said in February, when he was still looking for a backer.
Now – the costs for the expedition have been pegged at up to $17 million.
Predictably, perhaps, the 18-foot Deep Flight Challenger looks like something out of the Virgin fleet, a jet-like craft with short wings, a tapered nose and a cockpit.
The key to avoiding the worst effects of global warming is to make money while doing so – says iconic entrepreneur Richard Branson.
The chairman of the Virgin Group (which oversees 350 businesses) is involved in dozens of efforts to reduce carbon emissions linked to global warming, both in Virgin’s business operations and through spin-off efforts.
Branson was interviewed at the Fortune Brainstorm Green business conference here yesterday, where he argued that entrepreneurs, investors, and corporations need to take the lead on addressing global warming. Government policies should set ground rules, such as taxing dirty fuels, but political stalemate in the U.S., he said, made it difficult to advance alternatives to fossil fuels.
“The only way we are going to get on top of the problem of global warming is to build profitable businesses that replace those [fossil fuel] businesses” – Branson said.
In 2007, Branson launched a 25 million dollars prize to come up with the best idea to remove excess carbon from the atmosphere, a competition that has yielded about 20 finalists now being evaluated. He cited historic precedents for his effort, noting that Charles Lindbergh’s plane trip across the Atlantic and the Spitfire fighter aircraft both came about through quests to win prizes. There is also a Virgin Green Fund that has invested in green-tech start-up companies such as Gevo, which makes isobutanol from plants, a fuel that could be used in aviation.