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James Cameron Commissions Submarine To Visit Challenger Deep
frank249 writes "In January, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Trieste descent, the X Prize Foundation announced a $10 million prize for the first privately funded craft to make two manned descents to the bottom of Challenger Deep, the deepest surveyed point in the oceans. Now, James Cameron has announced he has commissioned a submarine capable of surviving the tremendous pressures at a depth of seven miles, from which he will not only try for the X prize but also shoot 3D footage that may be incorporated in Avatar's sequel."
Oh no.
Snorks! *Dives*
$ unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes,fsck,fsck,fsck,umount, sleep
Titanatar 2
"God Himself could not sink this tree!"
On the other hand, it got them there, but didn't do a whole lot of good. From Wikipedia:
"The descent took almost five hours and the two men spent barely twenty minutes on the ocean floor before undertaking the three-hour-and-fifteen-minute ascent. Their early departure from the ocean floor was due to their concern over a crack in the window caused by the intense pressure of their descent, and also because their landing on the sea bed had stirred up a cloud of silt which reduced visibility to zero and showed no sign of settling." So hopefully the new technology will give us a longer, more interesting time at the bottom...
Sorry, buddy, but I have not seen James Cameraschlock's Space Smurf Pocahantas and I never will. There are plenty of us who actually, really and truly do not like crap Science Fiction, will not see it, will not buy the Blue-Ray and won't mention it until some idiot tries to defend it or imply that, actually, I really really like it but I'm too much of a snob to admit it.
Um, not to disagree or anything, but how do you know it's crap if you haven't bothered to watch it?
meaning: the guy is not a hollywood idiot
i mean shape memory alloy turned into a villain in t2? or superconducting islands of rock in the air? the man is a true science geek in the vein of anyone else writing here on slashdot
so if anyone is going to get this thing built, with the money cameron has, he's going to do it, because he most certainly understands all of the objections you raised in your post. he is also diving fanatic, he got cameras to the titanic site, his technical and science acumen is outstanding
a science geek and an extremely successful movie director. frankly, cameron makes me completely jealous
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'd bet Spun also doesn't like broccoli. When the Broccoloid Menace invades, he won't be doing his part to save Townsville, that's for sure.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If we wanted to build a Saturn V rocket today it could not be done. The original design is gone.
GOD DAMN IT. I really, really wish people would quit perpetuating this wildly incorrect urban legend. The original design details, down to the very last nut and bolt, are on file at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Absolutely nothing at all is "gone". Source.
The experts that had been working with rocket engines since the late 1940s worked on the Saturn V. Today there is nobody that knows anywhere near as much about rocket engines left. While the main engines for the Shuttle are somewhat of a marvel, I doubt they could be reproduced today either. The people resources simply aren't there - it would take 10 years of experimentation and learning about rockets.
Also ridiculously incorrect. You truly don't believe that the Space Shuttle Main Engines could be "reproduced" today? You're completely unaware of the fact that they've been continually "reproduced" since the beginning of the program, right? That they're rebuilt between missions, and that the design has improved and evolved over the life of the program? That as of right now there are in fact nine fully-built spare ones in storage at KSC? The engineers didn't just build a bunch of them in 1980 and then zap themselves with the Men In Black flashy-thing--SSMEs have been constantly built for the past almost thirty years. If my tone is coming across as a little coarse, it's because I'm having a hard time understanding how you could have a highly-moderated post to Slashdot when thirty seconds of research would refute almost everything you just said.
The reason why building a Saturn V today from the old plans is impossible has nothing to do with "cheaper labor" or "people that didn't mind getting their hands dirty" or whatever stupidness you wrote. Rather, you can't build a Saturn V today because a Saturn V isn't just a bunch of tanks with engines strapped to it--it's half of a complex launch system, with the other half being the Apollo CSM that sits on top of it. A Saturn V is an end-to-end system designed around the IBM-produced instrumentation unit, two tons of analog and basic digital computers and instrumentation. It's not that you can't build it--it's that building it wouldn't make any sense. You'd need to completely de-Apollo the rocket for it to work right, and guess what? That's exactly what NASA has been doing, although the political will to make it happen is sorely lacking.
Please educate yourself before you spout off such a mixture of urban legend and outright incorrect craziness.