Space & Astronomy

OceanGate co-founder wants to build a floating colony on Venus

By T.K. Randall
July 30, 2023 ·  12 comments

Venus is not the most hospitable of destinations. Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Peter Rubin OceanGate - the firm behind the ill-fated Titanic expedition that recently claimed the lives of its five passengers - was originally co-founded by Guillermo Sohnlein in 2009.

Unlike Stockton Rush who perished in the disaster, however, Sohnlein left the company in 2013 to pursue other projects - including one that is even more ambitious than OceanGate.

Named 'Humans2Venus', his latest endeavor aims to set up an entire colony in the atmosphere of Venus capable of housing up to 1,000 people within the next 25 years.

"Forget OceanGate. Forget Titan. Forget Stockton," he told Business Insider."Humanity could be on the verge of a big breakthrough and not take advantage of it because we, as a species, are gonna get shut down and pushed back into the status quo."

If the idea of living in the clouds of Venus sounds a little too ambitious, then that's because it is.

Living high up in the planet's atmosphere certainly makes more sense than living on the surface because of its extreme pressure and hellish conditions, but even so, nobody is even remotely close to building a colony in orbit around the Earth, let alone on another planet.

Whether the stated 25-year time frame will be sufficient to accomplish such a feat remains to be seen.

Source: LBC.co.uk | Comments (12)

Tags: Venus, OceanGate