Steve Fossett's Unfinished Project

MazzThePianoman writes "Steve Fossett left behind a secret vessel project called the Deep Flight Challenger. Fossett was funding the development of a winged submersible being designed by Hawkes Ocean Technologies in California. The intent was for the vehicle to be capable of travel to the very bottom of the ocean — the Mariana Trench, more than 11,000 meters beneath the surface. 'It would have dramatically, dramatically opened the oceans for exploration. It would have been a game changer,' said Graham Hawkes, the designer. Testing had been completed at Department of Defense facilities. Field testing was only four weeks away when Fossett's untimely death, a year ago, put the project on hold." Hawkes Ocean Technologies owns the design, but the vehicle itself is owned by Fossett's estate.

Comments

Re:What's that pressure again?

[Nutria]

Or the reporter misquoted him...

1 Atmosphere = 14.7 psi.
Pressure increases 1A every 33 feet
36,000 / 33 = 1091 Atmospheres.
1091 * 14.7 = 16038 psi

16,000 ~= 15000

http://www.onr.navy.mil/Focus/ocean/water/pressure1.htm

Re:What's that pressure again?

[Anonymous Coward]

you americans and your funny buggers math... every 10M of water adds 1 atmosphere of pressure. 10m = 2 atm, 20m = 3atm, 11000m = ~1101atm. why would you opt to use such "lovely round numbers" as 32 and 14.7, when you can use metric. IT'S SUPERIOR, BITCHES!

Re:What's that pressure again?

[Teun]

I'm afraid you're mixing up two Decimal systems, the older Metric and the newer SI system.

Bar, Kg/cm2 and Atmosphere are certainly valid expressions for pressure in the Metric systems.
Another Decimal system is the SI and it prefers the use of Pascal for pressure.

A more complete explanation can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI