DailyDirt: Unusual Places Made More Accessible

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Tue, Apr 12th 2011 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Yesterday, we pointed out some links on space exploration. In honor of Yuri Gagarin's first spaceflight, here are some projects that are opening up other hard-to-reach places to the masses. Communism, FTW...?

Drilling down a few kilometers below the ocean floor could reach the Earth's mantle by 2020. Parts of the Earth's mantle have erupted up from the ocean floor, but going down to get fresh samples might be more enlightening. [url]
Recently, Virgin Galactic ostentatiously advertised for itself -- as well as its less expensive sister airline -- at SFO. However, there's a bit of a price gap between seats in 1st class on an A320... versus a ride on a sub-orbital-capable custom rocketship. [url]
Sir Richard Branson also has a deep sea submarine called Virgin Oceanic. It's nice to be a billionaire... And adapting a chain of record stores for other business models seems to be possible, right? [url]
To discover more interesting travel-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Filed Under: airline, drilling, rocketship, sir richard branson, spaceflight, submarine, yuri gararin
Companies: virgin

7 Comments

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Jake, 12 Apr 2011 @ 5:38pm

Anyone else get the feeling that Richard Branson has too much time on his hands, and/or is trying a bit too hard to live down his more-than-passing resemblance to Noel Edmonds?
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Nicedoggy, 12 Apr 2011 @ 7:06pm

I believe that Mr. Branson's interest in the bottom of the ocean is more in self interest since many of his peers appear to be sinking to that place.
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Jay (profile), 13 Apr 2011 @ 12:06am

Yuri's Night
Unfortunately, Yuri's Night was 4/12.

So in celebration, here is a link to the spinoffs of US technology that is used in space.

Link

Thing is, no one pays attention to all of the benefits of space travel. Rather, we take it for granted.

Thing such as plastics, communication, and even the engineers of Google were all possible from trying to find ways to beat Russia to the moon, Mars, and beyond. Sadly, those days seem to be at an end.

But it's worth it to see what the next few years of technology in private space travel can bring.
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- Michael Ho (profile), 13 Apr 2011 @ 3:50pm
  
  Re: Yuri's Night
  Thanks, Jay, for pointing out some of the spinoff benefits from the Space Race...
  
  But it's not "sad" to see the end of the Cold War, is it? It just means that technology is getting harder to develop at the same rate because it's already so advanced. If we could keep up the same pace, we'd hit the Singularity pretty soon. :P
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  - Jay (profile), 13 Apr 2011 @ 4:33pm
    
    Re: Re: Yuri's Night
    I view it as great competition actually.
    
    Right now, we don't have the government trying to push for Mars Travel which won't cost tens of billions, but it may only cost ~15-20B. That's perhaps a lot less than what we spend on the new Navy Rail Gun that's been firing!
    
    There have been a great many number of developments that came from space traveling with the Ruskies. I just wish we could do more to look around other planets. There's plenty to explore without robots taking all of the glory. :)
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    - Michael Ho (profile), 13 Apr 2011 @ 4:53pm
      
      Re: Re: Re: Yuri's Night
      I'm not in a huge rush for putting people on other planets... I think we should focus on creating a self-sustaining artificial environment that people could live in permanently. So no more space stations with "supply shipments" going up to them.
      
      Once we figured that out, then people could just go anywhere in the solar system as long as the radiation/zeroG/boredom didn't kill them first....
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Nicedoggy, 13 Apr 2011 @ 12:56am

http://www.shareable.net/blog/should-products-be-designed-for-sharing

I wonder if we could build an sharable submarine.
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