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Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

Just as a reminder, the idea of mining deep sea manganese nodules was developed by Howard Hughes' Glomar subsidiary in the 1970s as a cover story for the CIA's Project AZORIAN, a project to build a "deep sea mining ship" (the Hughes Glomar Explorer) that would deploy a sub-surface barge (the HMB-1) with a giant grapple to raise the sunken Soviet nuclear missile submarine K-129.

As such the scheme had to be "sufficiently plausible bullshit" to withstand scrutiny, while not necessarily needing to be economically feasible.

(No, I'm not making this up.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

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My father was an ME and EE and was one of the principle engineers on that project (of Clementine, the BIG claw that picked up the Russian Golf Class sub).

I used to drive him to and from the Redwood City shipyard as there wasn't a lot of parking there.

He also gave me 9 or 10 manganese nodules from the "test" mining run, which was the CIA cover story.

They look like fist sized black to gray cauliflower heads.

After the project was declassified he got a Presidential Commendation, which he framed and hung over the kitchen table.

That is amazingly cool.

>of Clementine, the BIG claw that picked up the Russian Golf Class sub

while this is partially true, you're leaving out the part where Clementine ultimately broke the sub, dropped the sub, leaving the US with no sub.

Not trying to cast aspersions on your dad or your memories, but the way you worded it makes it sound like it was successful if you didn't already know the full story. It's crazy to me how close to being successful this operation was, but the one aspect that people were suggesting was the biggest point of failure is exactly where it failed. of course, we have the luxury of hindsight.

For context, above commenter wrote a wonderful James Bond pastiche novel inspired by Project Azorian, because how couldn't he:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14150.The_Jennifer_Morgu...

I'm not the only SF writer to have gone there, either: Harry Turtledove published one just this year!

https://www.amazon.com/Three-Miles-Down-Harry-Turtledove-ebo...

When you're going to reply "And there was that Laundry reference too," and then notice that cstross was the "above commenter"...

I came to this thread to post a laundry reference, but cstross beat me to it. Can't complain :)

I had science books in middle school that when showing an example of manganese (for the chemical elements section), they included a shot of the Glomar Explorer mining it from the sea floor. That's how thorough the plausibility was to make it into public school textbooks.

Huh... my textbook in GCSE geography class (early-to-mid-00s) had an illustration of an ROV-style undersea robot harvesting manganese nodules. I wasn't sure how that approach would scale...

According to a book on project Azorian whose name I forgot claimed that the CIA hype on deep sea mining was so strong that some universities opened deep sea mining programs and recruited quite few students who were very surprised to discover that they spent years of study as part of the CIA cover story.

They did the same for modern art.

https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/

With similar results.

Did they reverse-psy-op the date of the post?

Extremely cool. The Soviets didn't even know where their sub was but we knew because of all of our hydrophones.

My father spent time as a Marine stationed in Iceland to guard parts of SOSUS. They were heavily briefed and trained for encountering Spetsnaz.

Last year I read a pretty good sf short story about deep-sea polymetallic nodule mining and went out and bought $34 of warrants on TMC, now worth $1.69. Ah well, I guess reading sf is not due diligence.

I cannot for the life of me remember what the story was though -- I don't think it was Arula Ratnakar's "Submergence". Hmmm. Maybe it was "The Little Shepherdess"?

Wait what is TMC? Is this like futures trading, but with less liquidity?

Abbreviation for “The Metals Company” which is the subject of the article

Something's good-ideaness is independent of both its current equity-price and its financials.

A great investment is a good idea (rare) that also happens to be undervalued (relative to the market) and possess strong financials (ability to fund itself in the current macro climate).

On the other hand, now TMC at $1.69 seems like a good deal

TMC will be dead in a matter of months. They have no money left, and this press release looks like a desperate attempt to recreate some hype and get some retail traders to give them some spare change. FED rates going up, vapor ware companies going down.

> Project Azorian (also called "Jennifer" by the press after its Top Secret Security Compartment)

Ahhhh, hence The Jennifer Morgue.

Makes you wonder what companies are being used for cover stories today?

At least one cryptography/security company is probably a front for a three letter agency. It used to be Crypto AG, but their cover was blown by Snowden.

SpaceX's "going to Mars" plans are just a cover for a vehicle that can allow the USA to utterly dominate Low Earth Orbit. Best part is that Elon thinks it's real.

It’s a pretty in the open quid pro quo. Musk gets Mars and US gets LEO.

I still think the "Going to Mars" plans are a stepping stone to mining the asteroids. The old book "Future Cities" from 1979 that I read as a kid (I'm 49 and I assume Musk and the other current billionaires did too) seems to be fuelling quite a few projects these days :) https://vdocument.in/the-usborne-book-of-the-future-558468df...

I was mostly joking, but you must admit the symmetry of fake sea floor mining and fake asteroid mining is beautiful.

What an amazing book.

I'd be amazed if some of the VPN providers aren't compromised

"compromised" means the check bounced?

I'd be surprised if some of the VPN providers aren't top-to-bottom three-letter-agency owned and operated.

True, and most Tor exit nodes are probably controlled either by hackers or security agencies.

I personally think that any VPN based in a 14-eyes country is suspect and basically shouldn't be trusted.

This is where “I can neither confirm nor deny” comes from. It’s less widely known as the Glomar Response.

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