Guillermo Sohnlein, co-founder of OceanGate, the US company that operated the ill-fated Titanic submersible that imploded during a dive to the Titanic wreck in June, is aiming to send humans to Venus by the year 2050.
"It is aspirational, but I think it's also very doable by 2050," he told Business Insider.
Apart from heading OceanGate, Sohnlein is the founder of Humans2Venus, a private venture which, according to its LinkedIn profile, is “establishing a permanent human presence in the Venusian atmosphere”.
The company claims to have the long-term vision of 1,000 people living and working in the Venusian atmosphere by 2050.
"I think it is less aspirational than putting a million people on the Martian surface by 2050," Sohnlein told Insider.
"You're absolutely right that when you talk about going to Venus, it would raise eyebrows outside the space industry. And it even raises eyebrows inside the space industry," he said.
Sohnlein’s partner at OceanGate, Stockton Rush, was among the five people who died after the submersible imploded in the North Atlantic.
OceanGate's Titanic Expedition was a commercial initiative to explore the 110-year-old shipwreck the submersible that took five people 12,500 feet below sea level.
Others on the submersible were British entrepreneur and explorer Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood, a businessman from Pakistan and his son Suleman and Paul-Henry Nargeolet, a French explorer and Titanic authority who participated in the trip as a "content expert".
They presumably died instantly when the Titan sub, about the size of an SUV car, imploded under the crushing pressure of the North Atlantic at a depth of more than two miles.
Mangled debris recovered from the small submersible was offloaded in eastern Canada, ending a difficult search-and-recovery operation.
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