Hacker News Reader

I can't help but see this like going to space... except more dangerous.

We don't have to worry about the rocket fuel.. but those guys are in that tiny little space with the sub holding back 500 atmospheres of pressure outside. Holding in less than 1 atmosphere in a space-ship is easy. Holding back 5 kilometers of water sitting on top of you is hard.

View on HN

I thing you vastly underestimate the hard parts of going to space. Building something to withstand 500 ATM is actually fairly easy, safely dumping over 30,625 times the energy to get to 100MPH into something and then disipating it on the way back is a little harder.

"Fairly easy" seems a little dismissive; if it were even remotely easy, it would've been done earlier and more often, for all sorts of reasons.

Neither problem is at all trivial, and the one the rocket addresses (getting there) is not the same one the construction of a submersible does (staying there). I don't think the two endeavors are really comparable in any useful way; they're both pretty impressive in terms of logistics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com