Sport Sub submersible

Slate.com recently recently featured and article, You-Boat, Can you buy your own submarine?.  They noted that drug smugglers had their own submarines to sneak cocaine and other drugs north. If they had subs why couldn’t we all own a personal submarine?  They then went onto say that, “around $600,000 will get you an entry-level, winged submersible without a pressurized cabin. If you’re willing to spend $2 million, you can buy a two-person submersible with a see-through acrylic dome.”  That seemed awfully expensive for a personal submarine. So we decided to do some shopping.  You an get started for a lot less than $600,000.

The SportSub submersibles built by International VentureCraft Corp. run between $30,000 to $70,000 depending on the model. They essentially allow scuba diving without wearing a mask or a regulator.  See the Youtube video after the jump.

Stepping up, or perhaps diving down, might be the better term, U-Boat Worx from the Netherlands, offers six submersible models that feature maximum diving depths of between 100 and 1,000 meters.  They all look a bit like flying saucers. They provide pricing on request, though an article from 2007 describing them as “The world’s first affordable recreational submarine” and mentioned a starting price of around 65,000 British pounds for a single seat model. Prices have no doubt gone up since then.

The open winged submersible mentioned by Slate is the Deep Flight Merlin, developed by Graham Hawkes, of Hawkes Ocean Technologies.  The Deep Flight Merlin is a three seat open cockpit submersible and costs around $600,000.   You need to wear a face mask as the regulator and scuba tanks are built into the submersible.

Jumping to the other end of the spectrum where money is no object, the Phoenix 1000 is 65 meters long and “ is capable of making trans-Atlantic crossings at 16 knots yet can dive along the route and explore the continental margins of some of the most fascinating waters on earth.”  It also costs around $80 million.  Here are the tech specs for anyone interested.

SportSub 1

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U-Boat Worx

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