https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-explorer-ve...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/deajusufi/2026/06/13/gabe-newel...
There's nothing comparably easy (for some values of "easy") to monetize underwater, except in shallow places like the continental shelves, and these areas are already being heavily developed (oil, wind).
There are many, many wonders deep underwater, but they are mostly not commercially interesting, alas.
We definitively have stuff to fuck up over there. Those ecosystem that do not know noise or light need disruption and market capitalization
Do it right and you can send the first underwater explorers to Europa.
Hard to find the right way to monetize in the early stages though. SpaceX had a variety of options.
Fugro got a tonne of money for sidescan surveys of large areas north of this Diamantina fracture zone up to the equator .. looking for traces of the lost Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
The search for the missing aircraft became the most expensive search in the history of aviation. It focused initially on the South China Sea and Andaman Sea, before a novel analysis of the aircraft's automated communications with an Inmarsat satellite indicated that the plane had travelled far southward over the southern Indian Ocean.
After a three-year search across 120,000 km2 (46,000 sq mi) of ocean failed to locate the aircraft, the Joint Agency Coordination Centre heading the operation suspended its activities in January 2017. A second search launched in January 2018 by private contractor Ocean Infinity also ended without success after six months.
Make several modular probes and give them fancy names.
Have various support classes like signal relay, charge stations, camera cleaning, resque etc
Sell rent lease the vehicles to customers who get to pilot them in vr.
Create a simulator where one can explore some already explored areas with the probes projected in real time. Create a market for map chunks.
I think it will make one hell of a game.
Roberts Space Industries Legatus bundle costs $48,000 USD and you only get pixels.
If you can have your own exploration submarine without having to deal with all the boring logistcs yourself people will gladly pay many times that and hire other players to do ingame jobs like keeping the signal alive.
If you can build the mothership with investors and crowdsourcing then maintain it with subscription fees and insurance policies it would be hilarious even before anyone finds anything interesting.
I won’t say I think outer space is easier, but the problem space is very different.
SpaceX is based on the idea that our planet will someday be uninhabitable, so we need to be ready to colonize other planets. The sooner we start, the sooner we get there.
OceanX might be fun science, but it's not going to save us.
The whole idea that we can simply pop off earth and colonize another planet is literally insane. There is a reason why no governement across the world is treating colonizing mars as a serious mission.
It is the same marketing technique as "AI WILL DESTROY THE WORLD so we must make it" fear-mongering based marketing. Of course a rocket company wants people to colonize mars, doesn't mean its going to "save" humanity.
Capitalism and stock markets would drive them to become Avatar'esque villains.
Anyone know why these wouldn't be covered under a thick layer of sediment?
So this look less like an organized cemetery, and more like Mt Everest, also littered by bones of the less fortunate adventurers.