OceanGate Founder Wants To Send People to Venus: 'Eureka!'

The co-founder of OceanGate—the expedition company involved in the recent Titanic wreck submersible disaster—is now setting his sights on something even more ambitious than the bottom of the Atlantic: the planet Venus.

Guillermo Söhnlein, who co-founded OceanGate before leaving the company in 2013, said in a recent interview with Insider that he believes 1,000 humans could colonize the planet in the not-so-distant future.

Söhnlein came into the spotlight after all five people aboard the Titan died after an implosion of the submersible as it descended to the wreck of the Titanic. Stockton Rush, OceanGate's other co-founder and chief executive officer, died on board the sub.

Under his company Humans2Venus, Söhnlein thinks colonizing Venus is a doable venture by 2050.

So far, most of the focus on outer space colonization has been about Mars. Experts have previously deemed Mars the most suitable planet for human settlement after Earth as it is abundant in hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon.

Astronomers believe inhabiting Venus would be nearly impossible due to the planet's hostile environment. Venus is the second planet from the sun and the hottest planet in our solar system.

It is a rocky planet with a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide.

The planet is surrounded by crushing air pressure, that NASA reports is equivalent to the pressure found a mile below the Earth's oceans.

While many astronomers do not think this planet is habitable, Söhnlein disagrees.

In a blog post on the Humans2Venus website addressing the question "Why Venus?", Söhnlein writes that there are several challenges humanity would have to overcome in space, including radiation, temperature, pressure, food, water, and breathable air, among others. But there is one that we cannot: gravity.

"Other than potentially building an O'Neill cylinder or a Stanford torus, it did not look like we would ever be able to offset the long-term effects of less-than-1G gravity on the surface of the Moon (0.17G) or Mars (0.38G)," the businessman wrote.

"Worse, the medical community did not really know whether Homo sapiens would be able to reproduce in these low-gravity environments, from conception to gestation to birth to genetic defects and mutations. For all we knew, our species could potentially get all the way to Mars and then die out within a single generation. To me, it became clear that humanity needed to find a 1G destination if we had any hope of becoming a multi-planet species."

Söhnlein wrote that he came across research accumulated during Venera, a Russian mission to Venus, launched between 1961 and 1983, that stated gravity above Venus' surface measured 1G.

"Eureka!" Söhnlein wrote. "Even better, at that altitude the air pressure measured roughly 1ATM, the temperature was relatively tolerable (30C-50C), and the atmosphere provided sufficient radiation protection (despite Venus being closer to the Sun and not having a magnetic field). Of course, the downsides were the CO2-heavy atmosphere and the clouds made of sulfuric acid. Then again, we already had technologies here on Earth to offset both."

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