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by Certified 1040 days ago
>And if you do need a manned platform, the deep sea oil industry now operates hundreds of them. It might be cheaper for scientists to simply piggy-back on those.

Not that much cheaper. At least in the US based oil companies I have worked with, the cost of sending even one person to an offshore platform can easily exceed 20k USD. Everyone on the platform has to have extensive safety training. Only a few training facilities are setup to do things like Helicopter Underwater Escape Training [1] so the cost is pretty high.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHTk3JNtMlw

1 comments

20k sounds like peanuts compared to the cost of maintaining their own platform.