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
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.
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