Brett Berk | The Verge

Why Honda is suddenly launching reusable rockets

2025-12-02T16:08:54-05:00

In June of this year, Honda launched and landed a prototype, 20-foot-long reusable rocket at its research facility in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island.

Though the company is known mainly as an innovative and iterative carmaker, it is also a transportation conglomerate, having developed and produced motorcycles, scooters, e-bikes, ATVs, boat motors, and even jets. Its skunkworks R&D center built the world’s first in-car navigation system, the first mass-produced automatic braking system, and the first production Level-3 autonomous driving system. Still, aiming toward the stars and potentially launching a competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX seemed to stretch beyond even Honda’s wildly diversified capabilities.

Yet according to Kazuo Sakurahara — a former director of Honda’s Formula One racing team who now runs the company’s space development strategy — it is a logical move. “Honda products have already expanded across land, sea, and sky,” Sakurahara says, from Honda’s R&D facility north of Tokyo, in his first conversation with the American press. “So, it is not surprising that space is the next field of opportunity.”

“Honda products have already expanded across land, sea, and sky.”

Honda’s stated goal for this initiative sounds a bit goofy, if phonily altruistic: “To contribute more to people’s daily lives.” But the multinational corporation also clearly sees rockets as key to its core businesses. “The rocket could be used to take satellites up to support mobility, energy, and communication,” Sakurahara says, referring to wide-area communication satellites, which are increasingly essential for the myriad connected features embedded in advanced driver assistance software, as well as a contributing factor in plans for autonomy, in all mobility products, from scooters to planes. “Though we’re more focused on transportation.”

Sam Abuelsamid, vice president of market research for the Telemetry consulting group, sees the immediate utility of such a plan. “Honda could potentially use such satellites for its own vehicles, globally. Or it could sell this capability to other manufacturers,” he says. “I could see not wanting to be reliant on a veritable monopoly like SpaceX, especially from someone who is as unstable as Elon Musk.”

Given the uncertainty introduced into long-term global geopolitical alliances by the Trump administration, and the threatening activities of Japan’s neighbors like China and North Korea, Abuelsamid sees other motivations behind Honda’s moves toward space. “These technologies could potentially provide defensive capabilities,” he says. “And they probably realized that they don’t want to be overly dependent on the US for that at this point.”

As it happens, the payload-carrying rocket is just the capsule tip of Honda’s larger plans for our solar system. Having developed fuel cell technology for over 30 years, despite failing to gain traction with it in ground vehicles, Sakurahara revealed a new application: a circulative energy system, meant to support sustainable activities in space, such as human colonies on the moon.

“I could see not wanting to be reliant on a veritable monopoly like SpaceX, especially from someone who is as unstable as Elon Musk.”

According to Sakurahara, a vertical solar array, created in partnership with American company Astrobotic, will generate electricity during the two consecutive weeks of lunar daylight, electrolyzing water with a proprietary system that can produce oxygen and supply hydrogen pressurized to 10,000 psi without a compressor. The oxygen can be stored, for humans to breathe, and also combined with stockpiled hydrogen to power the fuel cells during the two weeks of consecutive lunar night. If you’re wondering where the water will come from, Sakurahara says, ice deposits at the Moon’s south pole.

Similarly, years after shuttering its 30+-year-long ASIMO android program, Honda is modifying that project with an eye toward creating human-controlled avatar robots for off-Earth use. Strong and/or dexterous, they could be utilized in tasks like module building, refueling, and even fine motor repair skills. Controls could occur in proximity on the moon, or be beamed in from earth via Honda satellites. “Space is a harsh environment, so if this works, it will be an incredibly useful robot for people, freeing users from the constraints of time, location, and physical ability,” Sakurahara says.

The reapplication of past research and development ventures, even ones that seemed like dead ends, aligns strongly with Honda’s culture of creative reuse. “While this might seem like a diversion for Honda, they’re actually building on a lot of technologies they’ve been developing for ground transportation anyway—aerodynamics, fuel cells, vehicle control systems, and robots,” Abuelsamid says. “So, it’s interesting how they can take some of that and feed it into different endeavors that are beneficial to them and to their country.”

Is Honda’s dominance of space incipient? Probably not. Sakurahara notes that the company has not yet developed or tested a full-size prototype, let alone one capable of carrying relevant payload, and isn’t certain it will commercialize the system if it does. But it’s only been six years, and Honda was able to build a concept rocket, and launch, maneuver, and land it, without it toppling or blowing up. That’s a good start.

“If you look at how long it took SpaceX from when they started to when they were able to successfully launch and return a rocket to the ground, that was more like 15 years. So I think there’s a definite possibility that by the early 2030s, Honda could be launching,” Abuelsamid says. “They’re coming at Elon in a few different ways.”After colonizing our nearest celestial neighbor, will Honda try to beat Musk to Mars? “The Moon is 380,000 kilometers away,” Sakurahara says. “Mars can be over 380 million kilometers away. I think our target for now is to make sure that we hit 500 kilometers.”

A personal ode to the Boeing 747

2018-01-01T14:30:02-05:00

The Boeing 747 flew its maiden voyage in early February of 1969, a week or so after I was born. This was not a commercial flight. That wouldn’t come until a year later, in late January of 1970, a week before my first birthday, when the world’s first jumbo jet took off from New York following a bizarre christening with red, white, and blue water by First Lady Pat Nixon. It was just a trial, from the runway near Boeing’s new factory north of Seattle, a building constructed for the express purpose of assembling the 747, and, by the way, the largest structure ever erected.

The 1970s have developed a reputation for ennui, the so-called Malaise Era. This is somewhat deserved. Global events like domestic and international terror, proliferating guerilla wars, the OPEC oil embargo, massive inflation, urban population drains, crime and drug epidemics, and a pessimism resulting from an idealistic implosion in the social justice missions of the ‘60s certainly cast a pall over my formative decade.

But the ‘70s—with its historically high rates of union membership, its firmly redistributive tax code, its founding belief in environmental protection, its broad expansion of social service benefits, and its fiendishly motivating Cold War rivalries—was also a time of a belief in the possibility of big thinking, big picture solutions.

The 747 was precisely one of these. Formulated, literally, from pie-in-the-sky logic, the plane was meant to be larger, more commodious, faster, more efficient, more profitable, and with a longer range than anything ever built. It was intended, in an era of wildly increased access to air travel, to be the solution to airport overcrowding, a kind of car-pooling at 30,000 feet. A single plane could carry more than 400 passengers in typical configuration, or more than 600 if everyone sat in economy.

But underpinning this development was a fundamental belief by Boeing that the plane would be rendered obsolete as a passenger carrier by the kind of supersonic travel predicted by aircraft like the Concorde—which, coincidentally, also had its first test flight in the winter of 1969. This faster-than-the-speed-of-sound travel, it was thought, would not impact on the expanding air cargo market. The 747 was thus designed as adaptable, able to carry humans, cargo, or some combination of the two. The result was a broad and tall fuselage capable of holding enormous objects, which could be loaded in through the plane’s hinged nose. This need for cavernous cargo capacity was also the root of the 747’s most alluring and memorable feature in commercial guise: a second floor.

A second floor. One flight up.

A second floor. One flight up. On an airplane that flew six miles in the air.

I didn’t ride planes as a child. We were from Detroit. If we went somewhere — Chicago, Atlanta, Orlando — we drove, which was fine for me as a car-obsessive. My mother flew to Vegas twice annually with her bowling leagues, and we would sometimes accompany her to the airport and wait at the gate, searching the ashtrays and modular furniture for lost change or scratch-off lottery tickets in the hope of finding a discarded winner. But she didn’t fly 747s. So I glimpsed this chimerical upper deck only in movies, mainly disaster movies like Airport ‘75 and Airport ‘77.

It is the upper deck that defines not only the 747, but the 1970s. Upstairs, there was a lounge, bar, or restaurant, sometimes, but not always, restricted to business or first class fliers. Like one of the era’s famed nightclubs or music venues, there was a compelling air of exclusivity at its core, but it had some porosity to it. No door-closing executive suites, just banquettes, and tulip tables, and asterisk-shaped open plan seating arrangements. It was a party in a storage locker converted to human use until such a time that it was no longer tenable. Like the Paradise Garage.

At the heart of the upper deck was, thus, a kind of louche and tragic nihilism. It recognized that carefully and often artificially constructed social orders were being toppled, and should no longer bind us, and we should maybe just enjoy it until the end comes. Drink, smoke, and flirt in an open storage closet in the sky, until irrelevant.

1500 have been built

Other significant practices that got their start at the beginning of 1969 didn’t exactly end in longevity. Led Zeppelin, whose first album was released in January of that year, broke up at the decade’s end, following the death of their drummer. Richard Nixon, inaugurated a week before my birth, would see his presidency end, as it started, in shame and scandal. The Concorde was eventually undone by its excessive noise and fuel consumption, limited capacity, and destructive high-altitude emissions.

But the 747, against all odds, would go on to be produced in numbers never seen before for a commercial airliner. Fifteen hundred have been built, and they’ve flown 3.5 billion people 42 billion nautical miles. Deregulation and subsequent consolidation in the airline industry, and a race to the bottom quest for profits typical of our era’s vile predatory capitalism, would eliminate the plane’s signature upstairs lounge. Still, there are seats up there.

I’ve been equally fortunate in the intervening five decades. I’ve managed to make a successful career for myself as a writer, covering a subject I love — cars — a double rarity. And I now fly often enough for work, that I’ve had a number of fortunate recent opportunities to board a 747 in business class. Much has been made recently of the discontinuation of 747s from the fleets of our domestic airlines; United and Delta just flew its last planes on a farewell tour. But British Airways still flies three-dozen of them, the most of any airline. And, if given the choice, I always sit upstairs.

On my most recent flight home from Heathrow, I posted a photo of the plane’s signature internal staircase, reveling in the glory of this unique experience. “I don’t know much about planes,” I wrote. “But I know that I prefer the Upper Deck of a 747.” A friend, a transportation junkie, responded with his typical deflationary style. “It’s so noisy up there. Also, ever looked for the escape doors up there? I believe the pilots can blow the windows out and have a repelling device. Seriously. You have to go down the stairs.”

Drinking a glass of champagne, I channeled my inner ‘70s child, my sense of louche nihilism. “If there is any call for escape doors,” I wrote, “I plan to be already dead.”

The Lamborghini Urus and the case for super luxury SUVS

2017-12-05T11:43:56-05:00

This week, Lamborghini unveiled its all-new Urus super-SUV. This outrageously fast, 650-horsepower, $200,000 off-roading four-door is not the first sport utility vehicle from the famed Italian exotic automaker. That was the Hummer-esque, Countach-powered LM002 of the ‘80s and ‘90s. But that was a long time ago, well before a desire for high-riding vehicles — trucks, sport utes, and crossovers — transitioned from a niche market to a common one to one that has surpassed passenger cars to become the most popular automotive category. (It’s now responsible for two-thirds of all American automotive sales.)

It was also well before a brand like Bentley — another boutique automaker that is, like Lamborghini, part of the VW Group conglomerate — decided that there was room in the marketplace for an SUV that was capable of supercar acceleration, supercar top speeds, and supercar pricing. The brand’s Bentayga SUV, released in the second half of last year, accelerates from 0–60 mph faster than a Chevrolet Corvette, reaches a top speed of 187 mph, and hosts a starting price of $230,000.

The LM002 was first produced in 1986. | Photo: Lamborghini" data-portal-copyright="Photo: Lamborghini" />

Bentley produced the Bentayga because research showed that a great majority of Bentley owners also had a high-end SUV in their fleet. If the brand could gain even an incremental portion of this significant business, it was thought that it could not only organically grow its footprint and offerings, but become more stable and profitable.

This same thought also occurred to Bentley’s cohorts atop the vehicular pyramid. Since its release in summer of 2016, Bentley has pretty much had the ultra luxury SUV market nearly to itself. However, in the next year or so, we will see the release of similarly priced vehicles from brands like Lamborghini (Urus), Aston Martin (DBX), Rolls-Royce (Cullinan), Mercedes-Benz (all-new G-Wagen, Maybach GLS), and even Ferrari (unnamed FUV).

Is there buyer bandwidth to accept this expansion?

“It’s no surprise to see the ultra premium brands jump onto the crossover brandwagon,” says managing analyst Michael Harley of KBB. “As long as the prestigious badge is on the hood and driving dynamics are tuned to align with the brand’s reputation.”

According to marketing presentations, each of these vehicles is projected by their manufacturer to behave in much the same way as the Bentayga in the global marketplace: to drastically increase or even double brand sales.

But is there buyer bandwidth to accept this expansion? The global ultra luxury car market definitely grew last year by more than 15 percent (to around 28,000 units), fueled mainly by the capricious Chinese market, where demand for very high-end vehicles grew by a whopping 54 percent. Projections remain strong for this segment in 2017 as well. But adding all of these vehicles would mean half as many vehicles again — or more.

The 2018 Lamborghini Urus. | Photo: Lamborghini" data-portal-copyright="Photo: Lamborghini" />

“The appetite for ultra luxury SUVs, especially in China, means that if you’re not in the segment very soon, you may likely be left behind,” says Dave Sullivan, manager of product analysis with automotive industry research firm AutoPacific. “When the next downturn hits, or if something sends a hiccup through the Chinese economy, the brands without an SUV could see trouble on the horizon.”

But while Bentley reports that it is selling every Bentayga that it can manufacture, the American market demonstrates the glimmerings of saturation. With 10 months on sale thus far this year, Bentayga sales have not matched the number of vehicles sold in just five months in 2016. Though sales may gain strength in the typically strong months of November and December, the increase in sales is not likely to be significant.

“While Bentley has seen its sales numbers level on the Bentayga, the vehicle is currently making up about half of the automaker’s sales,” says KBB’s Harley.

The larger issue is what is happening for the Bentley brand overall in the States. Despite the introduction of Bentayga in August 2016, and a robust overall market hosting the highest annual vehicle sales numbers in American history, overall Bentley sales fell in 2016. Again, while the year-end segment is often strong, at current rates, sales are on target to be down again in 2017. So sales are not doubling here. They’re declining.

If we look at the other offerings in the brand’s portfolio, it is easy to see why: sales of the formerly best-selling Continental coupe and convertible have fallen by nearly 11 percent. Perhaps more importantly, sales of the Flying Spur and Mulsanne sedans are down by more than 40 percent each. Could it be that the Bentayga SUV is, instead of supplementing sales of Bentley vehicles, cannibalizing sales from traditional Bentleys? Granted, the cars in Bentley’s stable are at the end of their life cycle and will soon see replacement, which may invigorate transactions. But as the entire vehicle market flees from cars for crossovers and SUVs, might the decline in sedan sales be more permanent?

“The four-door sedan segment in particular is under pressure,” says Jeff Kuhlman, chief communications officer for Bentley of the Americas. “I don’t think it’s cannibalization, but the sedan segment is down throughout the industry — with BMW 7-Series, with Audi A8, with Mercedes-Maybach and AMG. Both Bentayga and Flying Spur have a place in our portfolio and in the marketplace, but, yes we will see some rationalization in the market.”

The Bentley Bentayga." data-portal-copyright="" />

If this is the case, it seems that brands like Rolls-Royce should be nervous about such an addition to their portfolio. With its equivalent luxury, and the enhanced practicality and functionality of a larger cargo area and high seating position, a Rolls customer may choose purchase the forthcoming $500,000 Cullinan instead of, as opposed to in addition to, a $500,000 Phantom sedan. This may be especially salient since the SUV will share its underpinnings, styling, and likely much of its rich and exclusive interior appointments with the new four door.

It’s hard to stereotype the ultra luxury segment

And will the same hold true for other brands? Ferrari currently makes an all-wheel drive four-seater in its GTC4Lusso hatchback grand tourer. Aston currently makes a four-seater in its Rapide, Could these vehicles suffer a similar fate in seeing their share devoured by a crossover / SUV? Because Lamborghini does not currently produce any large cars or sedans that compete directly with their crossover / SUV, producing only sport and super sport cars, is it possible that the brand may potentially fare better with its Urus?

“I think for Rolls-Royce it will do quite well because it will be in a class by itself. But each of these brands and offerings is fairly unique. It’s hard to stereotype the entire ultra luxury segment,” says Sullivan. “We’re seen more diversification in the ultra luxury segment than ever before. There will still be room for coupes and sedans, but seekers of prestige now demand a SUV.”

He goes on to proclaim a kind of automotive brinksmanship-cum-mutually assured destruction. “Of course, there is risk of cannibalization of the rest of the lineups for each automaker. But there’s also the risk of complete cannibalization by the competition without adding an SUV to their lineup.”

And some of it could play out via timing as well. “In this segment, anybody who has new product, that’s a great benefit,” says Bentley’s Kuhlman. “This segment is particularly sensitive to it. They want the hottest thing.”

Aston Martin shows off a new Vantage

2017-11-21T07:00:01-05:00

This all-new 2018 Vantage is a very important car for Aston Martin. It is not its signature vehicle, like the DB Series cars, named for David Brown who saved the company from financial ruin in the mid-20th century. It is not their hypercar “halo” flagship, like the $2.5 million Valkyrie, developed as a Formula One racer for the road. But it has long been the company’s best-selling model, its bread and butter, its gateway point of entrée for consumers. It’s a six-figure sports car that epitomizes the brand’s delicate, almost alchemical, blend of performance, luxury, and beauty.

This Vantage raises the bar in all three areas. Enhanced speed comes courtesy of the growling twin-turbocharged 4.0-liter V8 engine, produced by Mercedes-Benz, which holds a 5 percent stake in the boutique British brand. Benz has a hand in the technology that underpins the new car as well, providing its digital dashboard and COMAND information and entertainment screens and interface. Interior indulgence comes courtesy of Aston’s talented craftspeople, who create wood and composite marquetry, knurl metal knobs, and handily “brogue” leather — piercing it in a constellation pattern, as on a wingtip shoe, to allow subtle sub-dermal contrasting colors to come through. And the new exterior design takes the Vantage’s sharp-nosed, flat-tailed bullet shape and makes it at once more sensuous and more muscular. (Though we might be tempted by a more, ahem, traditional color than this noxious Lime Essence.)

EXTERIOR

A crisper nose, broader hips, more sculpted sides, and additional aggressive aerodynamic add-ons give the new Vantage a more menacing silhouette. The Vantage’s designers liken the shape to a shark: always in motion, seeking its prey. A narrowed greenhouse — the openings for the windows and windshields — makes the car appear lower, more connected to the ground.

The trim bits on the traditional “hill climb” Aston grille, the skirts under the doors, the rear fascia, and the triangular fender vents can be ordered in body color, gloss black, satin titanium, or exposed carbon fiber. A two-pipe dual exhaust system comes as standard; a four-pipe quad exhaust is optional.

The car uses no active aerodynamic aids to enhance road-holding, just the sculpted body kit and front and rear spoilers and diffusers. The narrow horizontal headlamps are inspired by those on the car Aston custom-designed for the last James Bond movie, Spectre.

INTERIOR

The signature Aston Martin “waterfall” — a curved cascade running down the middle of the cabin from windshield to center console — has been replaced by a more logical, and sporty, landscape array. Clear crystal transmission shift pushbuttons remain, but are now arranged in an arc. The blank triangular space in front of the infotainment controller can (and will) house a 7-speed manual transmission, a rarity in contemporary sports cars, but an Aston brand promise.

Contrasting color hand-stitching, embroidery, and broguing abounds in the cabin, offering distinctive moments of levity and delight. Trim pieces can be ordered in multiple materials and colors. Aston’s “Q” specialization shop can customize your car to your specifications. A squared-off steering wheel is shared with the DB11.

THE FACT SHEET

The Vantage is perfectly balanced, with 50 percent of its weight over the front and 50 percent over the rear. Lightweight metal alloys and composite materials help keep the car’s weight down to around a mere 3,300 pounds.

·      First US deliveries of the new Vantage will take place in June 2018
·      Price: Under $150,000
·      Performance: 0-60 3.6 seconds, Top Speed 195 mph
·      Power: 4.0 liter twin-turbocharged V8 503 hp / 505 lb-ft
·      Dog not included

A new book explores the CIA’s crazy plan to snatch a Soviet sub from the bottom of the ocean

2017-09-30T14:00:01-04:00

During the height of the Cold War, a Soviet submarine mysteriously sank in the Pacific Ocean. K-129 held a crew of nearly 100 sailors, as well as a full payload of nuclear missiles. Following its loss, the US Navy noted the flurry of Soviet activity dispatched to locate the ship and saw an opportunity to gain access to their rival’s military secrets. They decided to locate and then steal the sub. The fact that this was physically, scientifically, and perhaps legally impossible led the team assigned to the project to — often ad hoc, or accidentally — create, iterate, and apply technologies that would radically change the transportation industry forever.

Author and journalist Josh Dean’s new book is The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History and tells the story of the project, which aimed to grab the sub from its resting place — three miles below the surface of the ocean. Spearheaded by the CIA and funded by a top secret black budget, the program required numerous uninvented technologies, an outrageous vehicle to carry and implement them, and a fantastical cover story to keep the Russians and the public in the dark—one that unexpectedly helped jump start the existence of an entire industry.

The ship that the CIA contractors designed was called the Glomar Explorer, and it was like nothing that had been built before. One of the largest ships ever constructed, the central section of its 600-foot-long deck was dominated by an enormous derrick, which could lower 17,000 feet of metal piping down to the bottom of the sea. Its hull concealed a huge claw that could be extended on this three miles of piping to grab the sub, along with a secret, giant-doored cavity capable of retracting, swallowing, and transporting it.

The Glomar Explorer was thus extremely conspicuous — it was so big, it could be seen from space. But because it had to operate openly and with impunity on the open seas, the CIA had to invent a believable cover story so the Russians would not become suspicious of their real motives. The one they settled on was that it was an experimental seafloor mining ship, built for an industry that did not exist at the time, and owned by reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, who was pressed into service to back up these claims. To foster the perception that this was true, the CIA hired experts to write scientific papers for mining and shipping publications, presented the ship and its mission at industry conferences and publications, and “leaked” the story to the mainstream press to encourage coverage.

“I’ve been calling it the most specific tool ever made,” Dean says in an interview with The Verge. “It wasn’t intended as a step toward anything. It was built to literally do one thing, which was to pull a two million pound hunk of steel off the bottom of the ocean.” At the time, it was so beyond the capabilities of any machine on the planet, creating it required pie-eyed thinking, a nine-figure blank check, and access to some of the nation’s best scientific tools, thinkers, and contractors.

This kind of carte blanche engineering was not an uncommon practice during the era. At the time, there was a shared belief that technological and social challenges could be solved by putting the smartest experts in the world on the topic, and funding them until they figured it out, and that, because investment and possible benefits would be high, the government should be the source of this funding. NASA is a key example of that. But Dean argues that the CIA was another.

“Because of the secretive nature of the CIA, this isn’t widely understood, but the Director of Science and Technology at that time was essentially this ridiculous skunk-works for ambitious engineering,” Dean says. “In less than twenty years, they built the U2, the highest-flying surveillance plane ever made, and they built the SR-71, still the fastest plane ever made. But the stakes of the Cold War were so high the argument was, the survival of the nation and the planet depends on this.”

Like many experimental government programs in the era, much of the boundary-leaping technology developed for the ship ended up having extremely relevant applications. “Dynamic positioning was the big one,” Dean says, referring to the use of thrusters at a ship’s corners, which used special markers on the seafloor to help the ship maintain its position. This technology became important as offshore oil drilling became a standard practice, since it allowed a ship to hover over a specific drill point and insert and reinsert a drill serially into the same hole.

“It was also one of the first, if not the first, ships to have satellite positioning, to make sure that it was in the right place on the map,” Dean says, “this was so state of the art at that time.”

All of this was powered by some of the first computers ever loaded aboard a ship, but more impressive than these early, room-sized machines was the computation involved in designing this behemoth and all of its necessary systems. “This was all done one slide rules and calculators,” Dean says of the engineering team. “There were no computer models, these guys were doing it on paper with pencil basically.”

Closing the circle between fantasy and reality—like Argo meets The Abyss—scientific, industry, and popular interest in the CIA’s invented backstory actually helped jump-start the international practice of seafloor mining. A number of countries began exploring the possibility, including the Russians, who had clearly swallowed the phony tale.

“It was really a golden era of moonshots”

More pointedly, after its top secret mission was complete, the Glomar Explorer actually went into service as an experimental sea-floor mining vehicle in the now-real industry its fake cover helped to invent. The ship, then owned by Lockheed, was sent out for tests off Catalina Island in California, and successfully picked up manganese nodules from the bottom of the ocean. However, there was an issue. “We picked up a lot more nodules that we expected and jammed the system,” says Steve Bailey, a mechanical engineer who operated the tethered mining probe at the time, told The Verge. “And once it jammed, we couldn’t un-jam it.”

There were plans to send the ship back out in this capacity, but new global sea treaties, plummeting mineral and metal prices, and other environmental and economic disincentives conspired to bring the program to an end. However, Bailey believes it still may come to fruition. “Lockheed still owns the rights to the seafloor where we were working,” he says. “There are estimates that at the rate at which nickel is currently being used, we may run out in four years, and some nodules are rich in nickel. There are some places where rare earth minerals are in the nodules as well, and the only place where you can get them now is China. So there may be interest again.”

Meanwhile, strong entrepreneurial government funding for outrageous, but potentially revolutionary, ideas, seems to be at an all time low, with the Trump administration ignoring or defunding science aimed at alternative energy, combatting climate change, and space exploration, and even of innovative collaborations between government and existing industry. Speaking on research that occurred during the Cold War, Dean says, “It was really a golden era of moonshots, literally and figuratively.”