Beam Me up blog is the sister/support site For the Beam Me Up podcast. It contains links, discussion and material that might be or have been discussed on the show. Also links to new show listings and material. Be sure to check out the live stream every Saturday at 4pm eastern at http://www.wrfr.org/links.html and select stream
Wow, talk about a flash from the past!!! Do I REMEMBER this sub. I couldn't remember what comix I saw it in, but the 6.95 was such an astronomical amount back then, but I wanted one SO bad! So bad in fact that I asked my dad if I could buy one. Needless to say the late 60s saw me sans sub. Now I might have been a little old by the time I saw this, but it flared my imagination so much! I don't know what the equivalent exchange would be, but I hazard a guess that you would still be out the cost of a big cardboard box and some stickers.... But think about it! Man that would have been sweet!
If you should by chance find yourself in the Pacific Ocean - 62 miles southwest of Guam in the Pacific Ocean and 35,756 feet straight down, you might find it interesting to know that you are in very elite company. For you have entered into the Challenger Deep portion of the Mariana Trench, the lowest point on Earth, or the deepest part of the Pacific ocean.
Until March 26 2012 the only submarine to visit this area was Navy submersible Trieste, which carried the only two people who had ever dived on the deep, Don Walsh, a retired United States Navy captain, and Jacques Piccard, a Swiss engineer, reached the spot on Jan. 23, 1960.
On March 26th film director and James Cameron became the third person to bottom of the deep, in the submarine Deepsea Challenger . Cameron's attempt is even more unusual in that he did the dive solo and there-for the first and only person to do so.
At 35 thousand plus feet below the surface, pressure on a vehicle reaches a staggering 16,000 pounds per square inch, rivaling the atmospheric pressure on the surface of Venus. The environment, at this depth, is so hostile that more people have visited the moon.
Looks like Richard Branson isn't the only one aiming for inner space. It seems the race has been joined by the Triton 36000 deep diving submarine. After 50 years, the Triton sub plans to return to the deepest place in Earth's ocean, the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean. Only two people have reached this depth before. Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard made their history making trip in January 1960 and no one has been back since.
It seems, according to an article in Dvice blog, that Richard Branson is not sitting on his Galactic laurels. It seems that Branson along with Chris Welsh will helm the Virgin Oceanic vehicle on five separate dives to the deepest points in Earth's oceans. Here is a teaser trailer of the sub's "missions" and as the disclaimer points out Teaser Trailer of Virgin Oceanic's flagship sub! Disclaimer, this is simply an animation of the sub's potential capabilities, and in no way should be assumed to reflect a real mission. *sigh* well it looks pretty!
I was speaking with my part time co-host Ron Huber the other day about mystery power generating systems in Science Fiction. Of course I slid blithely into how mysterious Vern's power generator was in his submersible The Nautilus. Well I came upon this article on GeekendTechReplubic about just this subject. Their article starts off with the US Navy's U.S.S. Nautilus (SSN-571) which was the first nuclear powered sub for the US and the first to navigate under the north pole. Now at the time SNN-571 was being commissioned - Disney's version of Well's 20000 leagues under the sea suggested that Nemo's sub tapped into some mysterious power. Between that and the fact that SNN-571 was nuclear cemented into a whole generations mind that Vern's Nautilus was similarly powered. Not so! Verne clearly wrote that his Nautilus‘ power came from sodium/mercury batteries, the salts for which Captain Nemo distilled from seawater using conventional coal-heated furnaces. Verne’s Nautilus was revolutionary electric, rather than steam-powered, but nuclear never entered the equation. I am sure I am not alone when I thought that the navy's sub took its name from the Disney movie which took its name and power source from the Vern classic. Which vessel took its namesake from which is actually a little backward. It would seem that Disney's Nautilus was nuclear because the navy's was, not because Vern's Nautilus was....
