It's a well written piece mind you:
The reason so few people have done it is because it takes such nerve; and it is precisely because the market is so small, and *undeveloped, and populated only by risk-hungry billionaires, that the machines are still a bit *experimental. Unless and until we master this form of navigation, humanity will continue to live in ignorance.
Look at our globe, this beautiful ball criss-crossed every day by the contrails of planes, where virtually every inch of land has been explored from pole to pole. It is 70 per cent blue, covered by seas and oceans sometimes more than twice as deep as the resting-place of the Titanic.
It is a staggering fact that of the world beneath the oceans, only around a fifth has been mapped. We are more ignorant of the subaquatic landscape of the Earth than we are of the surface of Mars.
Some say that this undersea world is full of riches; like those rare metals we so urgently need for electric vehicle batteries, *abundant nodules that could be harvested without damaging the marine environment. Others are not so sure. But how can we know if we don’t look? And why should the chance to look at this world be reserved to an infinitesimal few?
That is why this mission was so important, and should be valued by Left-wingers as well as *everyone else. Yes, there were risks, and warnings. But every great advance must inevitably involve *experiment, and equipment that can seem, in retrospect, *dangerously inadequate.
Look at the slide rules and graph paper with which the first *astronauts calculated their *position in space. Look at those first flying machines — weird *contraptions of leather and canvas and wood. They were lethal — and yet no one tried to regulate them. The whole idea was new.
Hamish Harding and his fellows were trying to take a new step for humanity, to popularise undersea travel, to democratise the ocean floor. They knew the dangers. In the immortal words of Captain Scott, just before he died from the Antarctic cold: ‘We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint...’
Harding and his friends died in a cause — pushing out the frontiers of human knowledge and experience — that is typically British, and that fills me with pride.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ticle-12227209