Hasta La Ideas

That’s the SeaOrbiter, a 200-foot tall floating platform for aquatic exploration, and construction on it is due to begin this spring. It is the brainchild and passion project of a French ocean explorer named Jacques—no, not that one: Jacques Rougerie, a “sea architect” who has spent over a decade designing and securing funding for the concept, in addition to his 30 years of research in subsea architecture.

Slightly over half of the structure will be submerged, and as you can see the core of the design is a sort of eight-story building housing a variety of labs and living quarters for the crew. The underside of the structure houses dive pits, special pressurized living quarters and “underwater garages.” Human divers living at atmospheric pressure can get down to 50 meters below the surface, while “saturation divers” living in the pressureized chambers can get down to 100 meters; beyond that, the SeaOrbiter will deploy exploration vehicles that can travel down to 1,000 meters, and will also deploy a bad-ass diving drone that can descend to 6,000 meters.

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