British billionaire Richard Branson unveiled plans Tuesday to pilot a “flying” mini-submarine down to the furthest depths of the oceans, in his latest record-breaking adventure.
The single-seater Virgin Oceanic craft will try to reach the deepest points in each of the world’s five oceans — in what would be the first such feat — starting with the deepest of them all, in the western Pacific later this year.
“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,” said Branson.
“More men have been to the moon than have been down further than 20,000 feet,” he told AFP, announcing the Jules Verne, “20,000 Leagues under the Sea”-style project at Newport Harbour, south of Los Angeles.
Branson will share piloting duties with US sailor and explorer Chris Welsh, the chief pilot of the winged, space shuttle-shaped submersible, in the five dives planned over the a two-year period.
If plans go well and pressure testing of the mini-sub succeeds, the first will be taken by chief pilot Welsh into the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, which goes down to 36,201 feet, later in 2011.
Branson, back-up pilot on the first trip, will then pilot the red, white and blue sub to the Atlantic’s Puerto Rico trench — helpfully close to his Necker island home — which has never been explored before at 28,232 feet. If successful in reaching the bottom of the Mariana Trench, it would be following in the wake of the US Navy’s lumbering bathyscaphe Trieste, which got there on January 23, 1960.