From outer space to the bottom of the sea: UAE adventurer to explore wreckage of Titanic next

The UAE resident Hamish Harding who blasted off to space as a tourist on board Blue Origin’s crewed flight is now set on a new mission - to explore the depths of the Titanic.

Harding is a jet pilot, avid adventurer and chairman of Action Aviation. He has just returned from his maiden space exploration and is ready for a new adventure.

Speaking to Khaleej Times, Harding says, “I’ve been lucky enough to get another opportunity to dive to the Titanic which sank in 1912, when it hit the iceberg and split in to two as it sank, in 10 days' time. I’ll be lucky enough to go down the submarine and explore the Titanic and see what’s left off the Titanic now over 100 years later.”

The wreckage of the RMS Titanic, the British passenger liner, lies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Fascinated to see home planet from space

Recalling his journey as a space tourist Harding underlined that looking down on the Earth from the darkness of Space proved to be the most riveting experience for him.

Talking about his unique perspective of our home planet, Harding said he had spoken to several astronauts before his maiden space flight and their experiences resonated with his.

“Zero G is great fun, of course, up in space. But looking down on the Earth was absolutely spectacular…all the astronauts had said this to me before I did that flight… looking down on our planet from space is an incredible sight."

Describing his view of the Earth, he said, "You do see the world as a sphere. And you see a small atmosphere that is blue below you. But above you, the sky in space is all black. There's absolutely no blueness about the sky once you're outside the atmosphere."

The light from the sun is different as well. "Even though the Sun is up," he explains, "we were on the side of the planet that had the Sun. So the Sun was very bright, as we looked towards it, but anywhere else in the sky was totally black, which is a definition of space."

"In fact, once you're way outside the atmosphere, there is no refraction of light to make it look blue at all. And down below. There's the small layer of atmosphere,” says the British expat.

Elucidating on his experience Harding further says, “The first 100,000 feet of atmosphere above the Earth looks blue. When you look at it, especially on the horizon, as you look from space it seems the planet is very fragile. It seems like a small atmosphere when you're looking down from above. We were about four times the height of the atmosphere.”

Describing the calmness once the booster rocket detaches, he adds, “You're on your own. There's no further propulsion you're just flying freely in a gravitational pull of a parabola. So the booster rocket is serious, there is a lot of noise. So, as you launch vertically, you're going up to three G's of acceleration (3 times the normal gravitational force) as it reaches 2200 miles an hour or 3500 kilometers an hour, which is about Mach three speed… three times the speed of sound."

He describes the process of the launch itself as noisy and full of vibrations. However, the "best bit", according to Harding, is when the booster rocket detaches and the capsule is on its own in space.

"You have to stay in your seat until the booster rocket detaches because there is an emergency procedure on these rockets that if anything goes wrong with the booster rocket, and there's a lot of liquid hydrogen liquid oxygen inside the booster rocket so things can go wrong potentially. There's a solid rocket motor in the capsule that will fire off the capsule at 11 G to escape from the rocket," he explains.

He took some cups which had gone to the bottom of the Mariana Trench (deepest place on Earth). These were little polystyrene cups that got squashed outside the submarine. He says, “When you go to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, it's 1200 atmospheres pressure outside the submarine and we left some polystyrene cups outside the submarine that got compressed to about a quarter of their size and I decided to take some of those to space as well. So, they beat the bottom and the top.”