The co-founder of OceanGate Expeditions doesn’t appear to be deterred by the Titan submersible tragedy, and is pushing the limits of extreme travel with ambitions to send 1,000 humans to live in a floating colony on Venus by 2050.
Guillermo Söhnlein — who co-founded OceanGate alongside Stockton Rush in 2009 but later stepped away in 2013 — is also the founder and chairman of Humans2Venus, which he describes on LinkedIn as “a private venture focused on establishing a permanent human presence in the Venusian atmosphere.”
“Forget OceanGate. Forget Titan. Forget Stockton. Humanity could be on the verge of a big breakthrough and not take advantage of it because we, as a species, are gonna get shut down and pushed back into the status quo,” Söhnlein told Insider.
The outlet reported that the 57-year-old Argentine-born businessman pointed to findings by NASA that say there’s a sliver of the Venusian atmosphere about 30 miles from the surface where humans could theoretically survive.
Söhnlein’s envisions creating a floating colony that could withstand the sulfuric acids in Venus’ clouds — just one element of the planet’s atmosphere that makes it uninhabitable to humans.
He failed to address how this proposed space station for as many as 1,000 colonists would handle the 224 mile-per-hour, hurricane-force winds that are also characteristic of Venus, according to NASA.
“It is aspirational, but I think it’s also very doable by 2050,” he told Insider.
Representatives for Humans2Venus didn’t respond to The Post’s request for comment.
In a blog post shared to Human2Venus’ website in February, Söhnlein wrote: “I am not an engineer or a scientist, but I have ultimate faith in the abilities of both. Therefore, I always figured that they would be able to overcome the myriad challenges facing us in the extreme environment of space.”
He also explained that the organization picked Venus because of gravity.
Venus, which is often referred to as Earth’s “sister planet” because of their similar size and mass makeup, has about the same surface gravity as Earth does.
“When I was 11 years old, I had a recurring dream that I was the commander of the first human community on Mars,” Söhnlein also wrote in the post.
“I have spent the more than four decades since then doing whatever I could to help humanity become a multi-planet species.”
OceanGate was another venture where Söhnlein sought out his little-boy dream, he told Insider. He said that he and Rush “both saw underwater exploration — and especially using crewed submersibles — as the closest thing that we could do to go into space and further that vision without actually going into space.”
That dream ended in tragedy when the Titan submersible experienced a “catastrophic implosion” on its journey down to the famed Titanic shipwreck last month, killing all five passengers on board, including Rush, who was navigating the vessel using a video game controller.
Similarly to OceanGate, Humans2Venus will operate as a privately-funded operation aiming to make space exploration cheaper.
In his blog post, Söhnlein suggested that “a *private* group could certainly advocate such a vision,” and could likely do it faster than NASA, a US government agency.
“I could fully understand the political and economic realities that prevented NASA from adopting a ‘Moon, Venus, Mars and Beyond’ vision instead of its current ‘Moon, Mars and Beyond’ long-term plan,” he wrote.
According to LinkedIn, Söhnlein’s is the chairman of the WayPaver Foundation, a research-guided grant that, according to its website, has funded both OceanGate and Humans2Venus’ efforts.
It has also supported Blue Marble Exploration, a high-profile exhibition company founded by Söhnlein, who also serves as its chief executive.
Blue Marble’s team has taken five trips to space, summited Mount Everest and has plans to venture to the “virtually-unexplored” Dean’s Blue Hole in 2024 — the world’s second-deepest marine cavern at a depth of 663 feet — its site says.
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