William J. Broad

Bruce H. Robison, a marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California, began prowling the deep Pacific in a revolutionary craft in 1985. It was essentially a giant bubble of clear plastic that gave its occupant stunning panoramic views, instead of requiring them to peer through a tiny porthole.

“It was absolutely transformative,” Robison said recently. “The profusion of life was so much greater than what I had imagined.” The dark sea was alive: glowing, flashing, shimmering. “It was amazing to see all this bioluminescence and realize it’s a major form of communication,” he said. “It really changes your perspective.”

Three-plus decades later, bubble craft have gone mainstream, and thousands of people are experiencing that deep-sea vista. While Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos advance space travel, another set of entrepreneurs is going in the opposite direction, seeking to expand the exploration of inner space. Fans of the undersea craft sometimes call these new submersibles inner spaceships.

“They keep reaching deeper and deeper,” said Will Kohnen, who tracks development of bubble craft for the Marine Technology Society, a professional group. Much of the activity, he added, arises from growing concern about the ocean’s health: “People want to see it firsthand. It’s all about connecting with the ocean.”

The current generation of bubble craft can dive as deep as 7,500 feet, far below the last flickers of sunlight, and hold up to seven people. Larger, deeper-diving bubbles are on the horizon.

The giant plastic spheres and, in at least one case, a hemisphere, are opening eyes to the sunless depths of the ocean and leading to discoveries. In 2012, a bubble sub off Japan captured the first video of a giant squid, a creature with a nightmarish tangle of tentacles. A three-person bubble tracked the creature to a half-mile below the surface.

In 2016, a dive off Portugal’s Azores Islands caught sight of a female anglerfish and her tiny mate locked in a sexual embrace. Marine biologists hailed the resulting video as a breakthrough in revealing the behavioral secrets of the anglerfish, long notorious for dangling a bioluminescent lure in front of needlelike teeth.

This summer, scientists in a bubble off the Bahamas attached a satellite tag to a bluntnose sixgill shark, an abyssal giant that predates most dinosaurs. Scientists said the deep tagging was a first in the shark’s own habitat and would provide more accurate tracking.

The innovative craft are the result of many advances in electronics and materials science. According to Triton Submarines, a bubble-sub company in Sebastian, Florida, three tons of acrylic go into building a plastic bubble 7 feet wide, its walls 6 1/2 inches thick. The craft can take three people down 3,280 feet, roughly three-quarters of a mile.

Sub-makers are not immune to a sense of wonder. Patrick Lahey, president of Triton Submarines, said he was exploring the deep Pacific in 2013 in a bubble with scientists from American Museum of Natural History when he pulled out his flashlight and blinked it two or three times into the darkness.

“Off in distance, an animal flashed back the same number,” he recalled in an interview. “It was unbelievable. Something was communicating back.”

During the Cold War, the U.S. Navy pioneered the first bubble certified for deep diving and named it Nemo, after the captain of the submarine Nautilus in Jules Verne’s novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” The technology was so new that the Navy relied on Bruce Beasley, an Oakland, California, artist known for his bright acrylic sculptures, to cast the undersea spheres.

Nemo was 5 1/2 feet wide, with walls 2 1/2 inches thick, and could hold two deep explorers. It underwent sea trials in 1970 and, in the next decade, made more than 600 dives.

The bubble that Robison first piloted in 1985 was a one-of-a-kind craft, named Deep Rover, designed by Graham Hawkes of Deep Ocean Engineering, based in San Leandro, California.

Other commercial designers followed. An oceanographic team in Costa Rica has used a bubble made by SEAmagine Hydrospace, based in Upland, California, for deep tourism and biodiversity research for more than a decade.

“They’ve made tons of discoveries,” said Kohnen, the Marine Technology Society official who is also the company’s president. “It’s really fantastic.”

Bubble development is now driven mainly by extremely wealthy people — typically owners of superyachts, which can cost $100 million or more. A bubble is perceived as a status symbol; costing $2 million to $5 million, it represents a relatively small part of a luxury investment. Chris Cline, a billionaire entrepreneur, philanthropist and political donor who died in a helicopter crash in July, ordered a bubble sub for his superyacht more than a decade ago.

Another early enthusiast was Ray Dalio, a founder of the investment firm Bridgewater Associates, in Westport, Connecticut. With his superyacht and a Triton submarine, he became the first, in 2012, to capture footage of a giant squid in its dark habitat.

Dalio has turned his hobby into a global calling. Last year, he and his son Mark launched OceanX, an arm of Dalio Philanthropies that promotes ocean exploration and awareness, mainly through filmmaking. OceanX owns two bubbles and is building a second ship.

“Ocean exploration is more exciting and important than space exploration,” the senior Dalio said last year in a statement. “We are on a mission to show people that.”

In September, Triton announced that Kjell Inge Rokke, a Norwegian billionaire who made his money in commercial fishing, is buying a bubble that can descend 7,500 feet, about a mile and a half. That would mark the deepest dive yet for a plastic sphere. His ocean foundation plans to use the three-person craft for scientific research.

The walls of the craft will be 1 foot thick. “That wasn’t possible just a few years ago,” Lahey of Triton said in an interview. Triton contracts out its bubble production to a German team that includes Rohm, the inventor of Plexiglas, a brand of solid transparent plastic.

In a brochure titled “Luxury Submersibles,” Triton advertises a model that can hold seven people — a pilot and six passengers — and can be operated from a cruise ship.

Kelly Downey, a spokesman for Triton, said the company had just received its first order but could not disclose the buyer’s name. She said the bubble, which will have walls 5 inches thick, will dive to 1,650 feet, about a third of a mile deep.

In April, Victor L. Vescovo, a wealthy investor, piloted a Triton vehicle nearly 7 miles down into the Challenger Deep, the deepest fissure on Earth. Five feet in diameter, made of titanium, a superstrong metal, and featuring three portholes the size of dinner plates, the vehicle was a new variation on an old theme.

The Triton brochure also offers a vision of the bubble future: a vehicle with a “completely transparent pressure hull” that could reach the bottom of the Challenger Deep. In the interview, Lahey, the company’s president, said the colossal pressures at that depth would crush plastic and that the sphere would have to be made of superstrong glass.

“We’d have to spend a long time and a lot of energy to show it’s suitable,” he said of a bubble made of glass. “But it would be fantastic.”

Triton has also proposed building an undersea luxury resort called Poseidon. It would sit at the bottom of a lagoon in Fiji next to a coral reef and feature 24 guest rooms — not bubbles but domes made of plastic.

The rise of bubble subs promises to pay exploratory dividends for decades to come. “Regardless of the driver,” said Robison of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, “whether it’s rich guys with yachts or scientists with instruments, the fact that the technology is evolving means it’s going to be much easier to do this kind of research in the future.”

Graham Hawkes, the bubble designer who introduced Robison to the deep panoramic view in the 1980s, “said it was going to change everything, and he was right,” Robison said.

“We’ve been studying the deep sea indirectly for a century and a half. And now we can finally get down there and measure things and see them directly for ourselves. That’s a huge advantage.”

This article originally appeared in

Bubble Subs Arise, Opening Eyes to the Deep Sea

(Science Times)

Recently, officials in California announced that the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in the state’s history, had been fully contained. The achievement was made possible through the hard work of firefighters on the ground, with some help from above: a swarm of tiny, orbiting satellites that represent the next phase of the space age.

The satellites are operated by Planet Labs, a company in San Francisco that runs the world’s largest fleet of Earth-observing satellites. Its craft number around 140. All of them carry cameras and telescopes. In size, most rival a loaf of bread.

As a group, the satellites can view the same spot on the ground once or even twice a day. Until now, commercial satellites could observe a location only weekly or monthly, if at all. The quicker pace enables the close monitoring of rapid environmental change, including fires, floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, hurricanes and the effects of such events on urban areas.

“You can’t fix what you can’t see,” said Will Marshall, the company’s chief executive.

The Camp Fire started Nov. 8. The next day, a Planet Labs team in Sacramento began streaming surveillance data to the war room where state officials coordinated the response.

The governor’s office of emergency services used the satellite imagery to help map the fast-moving flames and determine whether individual buildings were intact, damaged or destroyed. Mark Ghilarducci, director of the office, described the images as “a gold mine” for managers and emergency teams.

“It’s situational awareness,” said Brittany Zajic, head of disaster response for Planet Labs. “The damage assessments were done neighborhood by neighborhood.”

Thinking Small, Dreaming Big

The Planet Labs fleet is part of a larger trend toward miniaturization. Satellites are shrinking in size and expanding in ambition. Made smaller, the craft are less expensive and more accessible to a wider group of interests, and they enable, among other advances, the ability to observe Earth’s environment more completely and regularly than ever before.

“It’s unbelievably significant,” S. Pete Worden, a retired Air Force general and NASA official who now chairs the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, said of the trend. “At first they were toys. Now it’s revolutionary.”

For years, space was dominated by just two nations, the United States and the Soviet Union. Their designs were big: Rockets grew taller than 20-story apartment buildings. Satellites expanded to the size of city buses. Spy satellites unfurled antennas nearly as large as football fields.

The debut of the iPhone in 2007 signaled to a new generation of satellite-makers that their creations, too, could shrink. Early models were called PhoneSats because their electronic cores were made of smartphones. The satellites cost just $7,000 apiece.

Today, relatively small rockets send aloft satellites the size of handbags, knapsacks and pizza boxes. The spacecraft teem with tiny sensors, circuits, lenses, motors, batteries and antennas. Last year, a single launch in India cast into orbit 104 satellites, shattering the previous world record for deployment.

The spacecraft came from India, Israel, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates, as well as from two U.S. companies, including Planet Labs. Ghana, a West African nation, entered the Space Age last year with a satellite the size of a can of beans. Outer space is being democratized.

Typically, the new spacecraft cost so little to build and send aloft that universities and even high schools are getting into the act. On Nov. 10, students from six high schools in Irvine, California, cheered as their tiny craft was carried into orbit. Its mission is to study Venus.

“It’s been really great,” said Brent Freeze, an aerospace specialist who advises the 160 students. “It’s a way to get smart young people to talk to each other and work together.”

Even NASA, a founding member of the big-is-better club, has joined the new wave. In May, it fired a pair of briefcase-size craft, known together as Mars Cube One, toward Mars — the first miniaturized probes to fly beyond Earth orbit. In October, after a voyage of nearly a half year, one of the twins snapped the first picture.

“Finally seeing the planet is definitely a big win,” said Cody Colley, a mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Late last month, the pair flew past the red planet and successfully demonstrated that miniature devices can relay data from a lander on Mars back to Earth, paving the way for improved exploration.

Mini, Many, Mighty

To be sure, huge satellites still regularly fly into orbit, especially ones devoted to espionage and national security. These gargantuan craft are made by some of the world’s largest corporations, and the costs can run to billions of dollars — creating an incentive to keep making them big, aerospace critics say.

But small is more affordable. After going through an experimental phase of development, mini-satellites began to soar in number, said Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks global launches and publishes Jonathan’s Space Report. The total number of spacecraft weighing 22 pounds or less grew from 12 in 2011, to 89 in 2013, to 125 in 2015, to 291 last year. McDowell expects the number to keep rising as more groups and companies join the trend.

“There was a feeling for a long time that space was a mature field,” he said. “That’s gone away now.”

Many of the new craft do traditional jobs on the cheap, such as assessing crops, mapping cities, relaying signals and managing natural resources. Wall Street analysts use the new flows of information to better assess futures markets. Companies such as Planet Labs want to make Earth observation less about spying than about helping scientists and the public better track environmental change, in an effort to improve management and remediation.

On Dec. 3, a SpaceX rocket in California sent aloft 64 satellites made by Planet Labs, and a total of 17 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Finland, Italy, Jordan, Poland, South Korea and Thailand. The rocket also carried IRVINE02, the second mini-satellite built by students of the Irvine school district.

Another, a backpack-size craft made in the United States, is to open up and bounce radar signals off Earth’s surface — a major feat of miniaturization. Traditional space-based radars can see at night and through clouds but require big antennas. Instead, Capella Space, based in San Francisco, hired an origami expert to figure out how to fold a nearly 100-square-foot antenna into a tight bundle.

“It’s the first of its kind,” said Payam Banazadeh, the company’s chief executive. “Out of a tiny box comes a humongous structure.”

Bigger goals lie ahead. The nation of Ghana is looking to build a tiny spacecraft with cameras powerful enough to track illegal mining and deforestation. Elon Musk, known for his Tesla cars and SpaceX rockets, wants to build a network of 12,000 tiny satellites that would beam internet access to billions of people in rural and suburban areas around the globe.

Last February, when SpaceX launched two test satellites, Musk tweeted in clipped prose that the orbital network, called Starlink, “will serve least served.” The company plans to start launching the satellites next year and have a rudimentary network in place by 2020, although the income potential for space-based internet is unclear.

Not every space mission can use tiny satellites. Miniaturization may not work for orbiting telescopes used in astronomy, nor for high-powered satellites that beam television signals to rooftop antennas and home viewers.

But the appeal of miniaturization is likely to grow: a large mission becomes less vulnerable to total failure if it can be subdivided into many tiny parts. “You add robustness,” said McDowell, the Harvard astronomer. “That’s been talked about for a long time, but now it’s happening.”

With the California fires now under control, Planet Labs is looking for new situations that could benefit from eyes on high.

“We’re space geeks,” Marshall, the company’s head, conceded. But the goal, he added, was not just to reinvent the age but to learn “how to use this technology for good.”

Freeze, adviser to the satellite-building high-school students in California, said he liked to think of the endeavor as reviving the lure of the unknowns:

“Our team,” he said, “has been working around the clock.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/11/science/satellites-space-nasa.html" id="3cbe5f84-4d87-3df5-a788-614e9b1cf2d8">The New York Times</a>.

It's a Briefcase! It's a Pizza Box! No, It's a Mini-Satellite

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William J. Broad

Articles written by the author

Bubble Subs Arise, Opening Eyes to the Deep Sea

It's a Briefcase! It's a Pizza Box! No, It's a Mini-Satellite