We’ve been going to space and landed on the moon a couple times I think, since the sixties but we are barely able to explore the deepest part of the ocean. What’s this about?
In: Engineering
Space is essentially a vacuum. Deep sea is the exact opposite. The crushing weight of the water and atmosphere above can crush steel and destroy vessels if they aren’t specialized
Because we don’t have much that can withstand the insane pressure. The deeper you go the more pressure.
As others that have answered said, the real reason is that there’s just not as much incentive. There’s comparatively very little value in funding deep sea exploration that hasn’t already been done. Science can only command so much funding at it’s preferentially doled out to the projects that have the greatest expected return on investment.
It’s not too much easier or harder; it’s mostly just vastly different.
For the ocean, you have to deal with extreme pressures; at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, it’s about 1000x the atmosphere’s pressure. Many things don’t work the way it normally does at that pressure, and any vessel will shrink significantly on its way down, making design really important.
In contrast, space vessels have to hold about 1 atmosphere’s worth of pressure against a the vacuum of space, so the pressure’s on the inside. That isn’t that difficult, really. The biggest issue is that the vessel has to get to space in the first place. And then things don’t necessarily work the same way, much like the submersible experiences.
The big reason we visit space more often is because it provides a frontier of science that isn’t reproducible on the surface. Things tend to go weird when you take gravity out of the mix, and we don’t have a way to emulate that for more than a few seconds outside of space. For any high pressure experiments, we can usually just toss it in a pressure vessel instead of sending it to the bottom of the ocean.
It is not easier.
People visited the deepest part of the ocean before anyone went to space.
Sending people to the bottom of the ocean is both easier and cheaper than sending them to space.
However, there is not much a person can do inside a submersible that an unmanned submersible couldn’t do – for much longer and even cheaper yet.
The possibility of a human doing a “spacewalk” at the bottom of the ocean is near zero. The pressure at the bottom of the ocean is about 16,000 pounds per square inch. That is over 3,000 times the pressure inside a spacesuit during a spacewalk. Engineering a pressure suit for walking on the bottom of the ocean is very, very far beyond our current technological abilities.
It’s way easier to go to the bottom of the ocean. What do you mean?
14 pounds per square inch. That’s all the pressure a space craft has to withstand of static pressure to keep a bubble of air at normal sea level pressure. Relatively speaking, a space craft with aluminum as thin as a soda can could do that. It’s low enough that you could probably inflate strong plastic, and keep someone alive in space without it blowing up. In a vacuum, there isn’t much difference in pressure from being on the surface, just that 14psi.
But at the bottom of an abyss, you could have a mile or more of ocean sitting on top of a submersible. That is a lot of pressure, a lot more than 14PSI difference in pressure between inside and outside. And there is only so much reinforcement you can do to make it stronger without making it so heavy that it sinks like a rock. A submersible must be neutrally buoyant in order to move around under water. If you make it heavier, you must make it have a larger volume to off set that weight to keep it buoyant. But making it larger exponentially increases the stress on the submersible which requires even more reinforcement etc. So they have to be very small, and light enough to float.
That being said, we have had manned submersibles travel to the deepest parts of the ocean. It’s expensive, incredibly dangerous, and because of the amount of time spent decompressing, and the need to spend several hours ascending and descending, the weather needs to be very clear or it can get dangerous quickly.
With space flight all of the danger is at take off an the landing. In a submersible it’s all danger, all the time.
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