Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme interview John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss.
Blue Abyss will be a high tech pioneering training and extreme adventure centre. Its objective is to be “the most comprehensive deep sea and space research, training and test facility of its kind in the world, unmatched in its breadth of configuration”.
Blue Abyss’ primary function will be to enable extreme environment development, both human and robotic, ranging from the offshore energy industry through to the growing human spaceflight sector and adventure tourism. In this interview John Vickers talks of: The need for his planned facility – from resilience research and human progress and exploration to repositioning the United Kingdom as a world innovator. Blue Abyss, which aims to be a world leading training facility, will cater for both the offshore energy sector and government and commercial space exploration endeavours as well adventure tourism. The gruelling journey to reach this point in the project. His personal resilience, necessary to get this far.
“Here is an opportunity to introduce new robotic technologies that deliver the strong industrial growth the UK seeks. It’s an opportunity to give children the skills and training they need to access the science and technology internships and jobs of the future. It’s an opportunity to capitalise on the burgeoning human spaceflight market and welcome a new era of space exploration. And it’s an opportunity to secure a lasting legacy for today’s society and for future generations to come”. John Vickers, Founder and CEO Blue Abyss.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:27:48] Welcome everybody again to another episode of the ideaXme Show. I’m Andrea MacDonald, the founder of ideaXme. ideaXme is a global network, a podcast available in 40 countries worldwide, a creator series and mentor program. Our mission is to share knowledge of the future. This is the second show in our Resilience playlist series. Today, I’m here with the founder of Blue Abyss, a training facility planned for the UK that will build resilience amongst astronauts and deep sea divers. He has his own resilience story. So let’s hear more. In your words, who are you?
Blue Abyss Extreme Environment Training Facility
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:28:48] Good morning, Andrea. My name is John Vickers. I’m the founder and Chief Executive for Blue Abyss, which is a next generation, extreme environment research, training and development facility to be built, first of all, in the UK with ideas to expand internationally thereafter.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:29:07] Tell us about the facility. The pool will be one of the largest of its kind, if not the largest of its kind.
Training For Astronauts and Deep Sea Diving For Energy Sector
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:29:15] The plan is to build a 50 metre long, 40 meter wide multilevel pool down to a maximum depth of 50 metres. So it becomes effectively the largest volume pool in the world of its type and the deepest. So to put it in perspective, an Olympic pool is three and a half thousand cubic metres and the first Blue Abyss will be forty three thousand cubic metres.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:29:39] Can you talk to us about the different scenarios – who you will be training?
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:29:53] This is a Marine to space facility. So actually we’re know, looking to work with as much with offshore energy initiatives and companies, subsea technology and robotics as we are with astronauts. Actually I think there’s a huge amount of synergy and learning and technology transfer to be done from a maritime environment to space. But if you look at space, we’re now increasingly getting used to the idea that humanity will be returning itself to the Moon. Whether or not we managed to make the 2024 date that originally came out under President Trump, I think under the new administration in the US, they are still committed under the Artemis program to returning humanity to the lunar surface as quickly and as soon as safely as possible. And I hope that is 2024, but I suspect it may slip, but it would thereafter be hopefully part of a widening and growing initiative. At first, we absolutely would concur that it’s going to be a number of government astronauts. So fewer people, under the guise of NASA. Thereafter you will see other countries following the same route, whether it’s the Chinese, the Russians or some smaller nation using one of those bigger countries to piggyback upon. But I think there are that we would absolutely recognize it’s a new frontier. And typically with new frontiers, you get a few intrepid explorers to begin with and then the market expands, whether that’s an orbiting space hotel, whether that’s some form of additional work station like the ISS, whether there are businesses that base themselves in space or we go in resource claim resources or try and mine resources from the Moon or asteroids, for instance. I think as those endeavours start to open up, you will see a transition from a few select government astronauts into what you might term a much more commercial footing, members of the public who apply to go and work and live in space. And our intention is to deliver a first-hand experience for people to experience what’s it like to train like an astronaut and do so in a wholly astronaut centric environment. That is, it’s approved by and has people who’ve done it been there and done it effectively. And then going forward from that experience base, you have a number of people who think, look, you know, if there is an opportunity, you have the wherewithal to come and do much more intensive training weeks and months, not just a few days. And as careers open up, I think then you are looking at a much wider audience. But in space, more than perhaps any other environment, is not just the intent of the individual. Would I like to go? Yes. Am I the right person to go into space? I don’t know, because I don’t think it’s a physical aptitude and it’s not how intelligent you are, but it’s probably more or less based eventually upon at the moment, your psychological resilience to stress. How would I cope in an environment which is wholly alien to us? And unlike deep ocean, where you’re from a human’s perspective, you’re a few hundred metres away from safety at best in space you may be a few hundred kilometres away from safety. And I think it takes a very special individual to be able to live and work in space. And our endeavour in opening up the market is to equally sadly for the moment, tell everybody it’s might not be for you.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:33:15] Your facility is not just it or will not just be a training facility in isolation. There will also be a research element to the Blue Abyss entity. Could you talk about that, please?
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:33:31] So predicated in the envelope that contains the pool building. We’ve always had a mind to celebrate one of the original researchers who helped put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the Moon, a chap called Professor Walter Kuehnegger, who suddenly is no longer with us. And so part of the facility within that envelope of the building is to create Walter Kuehnegger, human performance centre pioneered by my colleague, Dr Simon Evetts. And in addition to promoting that maritime and space related physiological R&D, typically aiming at people, how do people behave underwater? What can we learn from their long term exposure underwater and/or space? The opportunity for us to create an R&D centric campus is being spurred on by a sister company, Sea Space Research.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:34:19] So your entity, planned entity will feed into not just nation-wide science as far as the U.K. is concerned, it will feed into global science and ultimately human resilience overall. Can you talk about the progress of the project you first started to think about in 2014? It’s been a journey of resilience in itself. Take us through the chronology and where you are now, please.
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:34:55] Certainly can’t just go back. And you very kindly and rightly said this is not just about the UK or Europe. This is an international effort. I would hope that humanity is starting to appreciate. And sometimes I think we’re getting there and sometimes I don’t think we are, that we’re all interconnected. And I always use the analogy if you’re underwater and I suspect the same is true in space, you wouldn’t care who was coming there to help you. You wouldn’t be guided by their religious beliefs or their orientation or the colour of their skin. You’d be interested in the help they can give you. And to me, Blue Abyss has always stood for humanity first. Individual agendas can wait outside!
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:35:35] With that in mind. In 2014 I came up with the idea. Some say I stupidly. But here we are six and a half years later. I think I’ve learned a degree of resilience. Resilience for me has been a very individual experience. It’s less about, what can we achieve at times and more about am I prepared to go through all the sort of naysayers and all of the negatives? If you’re going to get turned down once or twice for something you can probably put up with. But when you time and time again, put months and years of effort and money and other people’s time and their effort into an initiative to have somebody with no real sense of longevity or ownership, just say we don’t agree. You think, well, hold on a minute. This will make a fundamental difference. You agreed enough to take us on the journey then they stop supporting us for the most obscure or petty reasons. And I found that particularly challenging. I mean, absolutely. So it’s a mental resilience that I think I’ve had to now have succeeded. Probably not. But I’m learning, too. You just have “to ride the rough with the smooth” as the saying goes. So we’re now at the point where we’re on the cusp of being able to finally have been our planning in a region in the south west of the UK, a region who I’m really hopeful for their sake, have made a transition from: “Look, please come and help us. We need help”. We’re seen as slightly the poor man of England, for instance, into one of being an absolutely dynamic and thrusting environment in which businesses are being encouraged and initiatives are coming out of. And for me, that’s just so exciting. We’re adding to this, we’re not the sole proprietor. The region already has a fantastic feel about it. And so I’m encouraged about how we’re being pulled as much as we’re pushing.
Blue Abyss, Cornwall Location
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:37:36] And are you allowed to talk of which region that is?
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:37:39] Yes, it is Cornwall.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:37:43] You have an offer of funding, but the offer of funding is subject to a government guarantee. Could you explain to the audience in very simple terms how that works and what you have done so far at prime ministerial level to try to make that happen?
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:38:07] Absolutely. So when you get to a certain size of project that we’re talking of. In this case over 100 million pounds, rightly, anybody that’s going to lend you money, whether they invest the money directly in the company or they make it available as a debt facility is going to say: What the mechanism for this being repaid? How am I going to be assured that you’re going to be successful? And there’s only two routes, really, either we continue to look for and we continue to do so anyway commercial entities, government, university contracts, who would underwrite? So we can demonstrate in the pipeline if people are familiar with that term. This is the amount of income we can see each year. When there’s been a degree of uncertainty because all the businesses we speak to across the whole spectrum of target sectors, there is nobody yet that I’ve come across a very significant and we’ve talked to lots of individuals and companies who said we wouldn’t use you. So there is a latent need, desire, interest and opportunity that we are creating. But with the uncertainty of when are you opening and where? And which location is absolutely going to be behind you, so that it’s not just we will be opening, but we’re not really sure of the long term opportunity here. Companies aren’t prepared to commit. In June and July last year, when we were starting to go through the first phase of the pandemic, the UK government, through the Chancellor, the Prime Minister himself, the Business Secretary, we’re all saying that we need to create new bold initiatives in this country, infrastructure and R&D.
Meeting With UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson To Discuss Blue Abyss
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:39:42] And I would suggest that Blue Abyss fulfils both. We’ve been in discussions for a number of years with the Treasury. I briefed the Prime Minister at the end of October during an opportunity to meet with him about what we were seeking. And that is the alternative to: I’ve got all of these companies desperate to open the door. They’re going to start paying me.
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:40:03] We know that latent desire is there. So we’ve gone to the government and said: Please don’t give us money, but please provide our backers with a degree of certainty that if everything there was another pandemic, the world suddenly went into a different sort of outlook, the government would stand behind us. It’s a bit like having the bank of mum and dad, when the youngster wants to buy a house. It is a huge initiative. It’s a big debt. The individual says: I’m working, I can repay this. But the banks still say, are your mum and dad prepared to put their second signature on the form? That’s all we’re asking. That is commercially is available for a number of companies and we’re just looking to take up that opportunity
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:40:46] If it never gets off the ground in the UK, have you thought of relocating the project to America or another country?
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:40:58] We have already had discussions about other facilities abroad in the USA, Far East and the Middle East. That would be a let-down for me. We have this opportunity in the UK, whichever way you voted about Brexit, the country has said we’ve made the decision we want to reassert ourselves on the world stage, that this is a country that has initiatives and people capable of helping take humanity forward. And I would suggest that Blue Abyss is one of those sorts of initiatives. It’s a big, bold opportunity for the UK to put itself on the map to sponsor not just UK or European centric R&D across maritime and space, but actually globally. It will inspire hopefully other people to think that they, too, can build facilities like Blue Abyss or something similar. The UK is already a market leader in terms of satellite technology and offshore energy, wind farms. We want to build on that. If we want to grow the amount of space business that comes through this country, we want to increase the number of wind farms and new dynamics. So floating offshore wind farms, rather than static offshore wind farms that are bolted directly to the seabed.
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:42:26] There’s a whole range between those two sectors, from defence to maritime blue economy stuff. I think the UK stands at the vanguard of wanting to deliver. So why wouldn’t we take on an initiative like this which would help further those individual desires? This is a facility that enables. It’s not about the facility. It’s what we enable and who we enable. Because they can do much more effective R&D, much more safely, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year prior to real world deployment. So you save an inordinate amount of time and money doing that. And if this country doesn’t embrace something, whether it is me sat here, or somebody else, then I think that for all the rhetoric, we’re lacking that function to do something about it. And when you talk about something and do nothing, you just talk. Talk is cheap. And I think we’ve seen people wanting to make a commitment are there. But show me some action. Then, customers will sign on the dotted line and give us contract to use the facility for the next 10 or 15 years.
Potential Customers For Blue Abyss
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:43:39] And just interesting to pursue the idea of endorsement further. There are three billionaires, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Elon Musk, who are pursuing space tourism, space industry and exploration. Larry Page, co-founder of Google is also interested in planetary mining. These are all potential customers. I know we’re looking at Space again and there’s a whole other area of market for you. But just for argument’s sake, looking at space, again, potential customers. Have you had meetings with any of the billionaires?
Need to Raise Awareness And Understanding Of Astronaut Training
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:44:33] We haven’t had direct meetings with any of the billionaires. And to a degree, that suited me fine. We want to get necessarily branded by anybody at this stage. This is not for one entity or another. What Elon Musk and SpaceX have achieved and are regularly delivering for NASA and private companies in terms of taking supplies and humans back to the ISS from America’s perspective, is fantastic. Blue Origin’s progression and future intentions are less publicised. Virgin Galactic, are aiming at a much more experiential and tourist angle, whereas I think SpaceX and Blue Origin are looking at a much more long term, much more commercial element of the market. I have not heard any of the billionaires, talk of training. But future astronauts are very much concerned with it as you might imagine. They want to know: Who is doing the training and what does it entail?
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:45:44] If something goes wrong on a parabolic flight, you’d expect to have been given a sufficient safety briefing. Also, that there will be sufficient staff (and team members) to help eradicate and remove you from that challenge? I don’t think enough action’s been paid to the low Earth orbit, suborbital experiences are something different. You’re still doing it within the Earth’s atmosphere. Typically, the minute you transition into low earth orbit and beyond I think the pragmatism from every astronaut I’ve spoken to and I’ve been fortunate to meet a number of them, not one has ever said, let’s downplay the training.
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:46:23] The rocket is bound to work. Once the fuse is lit, you’re going. You’re literally along for the ride. But the minute you get into space, your body goes through a whole series of physiological changes, building up resilience. It can be the realisation: Crikey, I am genuinely in space. Everything’s upside down. I don’t feel too well. How am I going to cope if I wake in the middle of the night and suddenly panic?
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:46:55] Building psychological resilience is paramount for astronaut training. If you mentioned to any of those astronauts, those billionaires, what are you doing about training people? I think I’ve heard instances where it’s almost pooh poohed. It’s not prominent in people’s minds that you will need to do this training. So why do astronauts do it? Entities like NASA, CNSA, the Chinese space agency, Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, ESA, the European Space Agency – government agencies are not designed to cater for the mass market. Why should they? So we are looking to take that level of quality and capability and help the market transition by broadening access to that training.
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:47:44] We may still fail people because the level of training is such that it’s not suitable for everybody. We’re enabling that transition between a few. If you want to go, you will need to prepare. You need to train and you need to do so thoroughly. And you need to know that all of your crew mates who go out with you have been trained to the same level. You need to know that you can rely on them if things go wrong in the middle of the night in low earth orbit on a small space tourist hotel. And that if the crew member is injured or ill that Andrea Macdonald is going to perform in that environment. We need to ask that question. So I haven’t seen much of that. But “sure as eggs are eggs” it’s coming and we want to be at the vanguard of.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:48:51] We’ve spoken about the space environment as far as your potential customers are concerned. Can you talk to us a little bit about the ocean’s environment and who you would regard as the ideal customers? Just name some names!
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:49:11] Well, I would suggest that the ideal customers are offshore energy companies. So historically they will be the oil and gas major companies and increasingly, obviously, the renewables. And we’re predominately when we talk about renewables, we are talking about wind, wind, farm providers, whether they’re floating or whether they’re static. But it’s less about those companies but it’s more about the supply chain behind it. Those companies providing subsea technology, whether it’s connectors, whether it’s investigative tools or increasingly, I thing that I’m a passionate champion for robotics.
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:49:49] Humans are relatively good on the surface of the Earth, but put us underwater for any length of time without a breathing mixture, we’re not so good. And the same is true in space. I think the recognition that if we’re going to continue to use our oceans two things, let’s do so with a much more environmental awareness. Our oceans belong to all of us, so our willingness to exploit them has to be equally matched with our ability to sustain that exploitation and do so with a mind to what’s the actual cost of doing this deep sea mining, extracting oil and gas, facing a wind farm, whether you physically locate the pylon on the seabed or whether you have it floating above, what’s the long term impact? Will it affect fish? Will it affect how scallops are breeding? Does it get in the way of migratory birds or mammals? We need to have an awareness. And now increasingly, we are also recognizing that the sea offers a huge opportunity to be very bountiful in terms of food, in terms of growing algae for food.
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:50:53] But we need to be mindful that when we take out one species, because we blatantly just cast huge nets out and we capture dolphins and turtles and apex predators, therefore we remove an amount of the sort of natural hierarchy in the ocean. There’s going to be an imbalance. We’ve treated that with disdain historically. Look at the size of the rubbish piles in the Pacific Ocean. We talk about something the size of Texas or bigger..
Subsea Technology And Robotics
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:51:38] As a youngster, I was heavily influenced by the oceans. There’s a huge unknown about it. New life is still being discovered in our oceans. This are probably all sorts of minerals and valuable resources that we can utilize if we do so sensitively. So we’re appealing on a day to day basis to the maritime sector to say we can support and we’ve got engagement with numbers of subsea technology companies and robotics companies. I think robotics will continue to grow. And the bit that I was mentioning, I think that robotics is important because in space we’ve utilized you know, we’ve relied on a couple of people at a time perhaps doing a spacewalk and fixing something on the excess or a couple of people at a time going to the Moon. But as we make that much more of a sort of a regular occurrence, us going to the Moon, so they’ll probably be halfway houses, refuelling space hotels, et cetera. We talked about that a second ago. How are you going to service all of those things? Why not have a drone, an undersea vehicle that’s used to operating in the three dimensional extreme environment? Why aren’t we developing those now? And I think the UK can be a pioneer of delivering technology where we’re already pioneering in our ROV, the Navy’s. Let’s take that into space. There is much more synergy between what we’ve got on this planet in terms of our oceans and space than I think people realize.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:53:31] Looking at timings, let’s say, Cornwall will agree, that you can build your facility, the Blue Abyss Facility in Cornwall, they put out the red carpet for you. Boris Johnson says, OK, the UK government will give you the guarantee that you need in order for the funding to be released. What is the time frame after that money comes in? How long will it take to build it?
G7 Summit, 2021
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:54:03] We’re progressing with an intention that we will be submitting planning within a few months. That’s the intention. That’s the dialogue at the moment. We the G7 coming up. It would be wonderful to be able to, on behalf of Cornwall, announce this initiative in Cornwall, providing a lift for that G7 and also the long term legacy benefit. As soon as we have submitted and received planning. Obviously, we will only submit planning if we were confident of getting approval for it. So we are doing everything we can to optimise the likelihood of getting approval.
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:54:38] In terms of what we submit. And then we’ve got an 18 month build plan. The hotel element of the two buildings that we’re building as phase one, that may be open slightly earlier. Our intention to offer our own parabolic flight may be opened slightly earlier than the main pool facility. The pool is, by way in the far the single biggest element of the construction. So from middle of this year, you’re looking at the beginning of 2023, spring of 2023. Having said that, a number of times, I would recognize that people cynicism would come to the fore. But you said that before. But here we have a region who I think is intent in helping make sure that we are doing what we say and down to making sure that what we submit meets with their approval, then I’m confident about this time scale. Unlike previously, what we have now is that tacit support.
Investment Need To Build Blue Abyss
[00:55:35] The total investment in Blue Abyss is 150 million?John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:55:40] Slightly more than that for this first phase.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:55:43] What will the total amount for all the phases be?
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:55:49] That we are looking more like £165 million, maybe slightly more than that. In the scheme of things, though, the number of benefits that that money will bring because of the effect I mean, we see ourselves as the centre of a much wider business initiative. We’re enabling a number of other companies to either relocate to Cornwall or start in Cornwall or be able to provide itself Cornwall with the R&D capability. I think that that, forgive the pun, is a drop in the ocean to the overall economic benefit that will be created.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:56:24] How many again, focusing on space, how many astronauts, future astronauts at any one time will Blue Abyss be able to train?
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:56:38] As I mentioned, our intention is to offer experiential courses. So you perhaps come for a few days a week and spend some time doing the things you know as an alternative to playing golf somewhere. We want to offer people to come and do something meaningful and exciting.
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:56:59] We’re trying to keep it relatively modest. So a course will probably comprise twelve people. As we move into a phase where we work with perhaps smaller countries, perhaps the European Space Agency and eventually NASA and their ilk. It depends on how many government astronauts need to be trained. You know, you don’t spend your entire time in the pool when you’re doing astronaut training. There are other elements that we will bring forward to help support that. But nevertheless, there will be outside things you’ll get from completely different companies. And I think the real transition will come within this decade.
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:57:43] I think within this decade we will see the rise of opportunities. We’ve had a number of people who have gone to the ISS as space tourists who spent relatively large amounts of money to do so. And that’s not a fundamental business model necessarily, because you’re not going to get every multi-millionaire or billionaire wants to go into space. You need to recognize that when the price starts to come down more people will want to go to space. And I would see that starting to happen this decade. Where will they go? Well, it might be with Blue Origin or SpaceX just round the Earth, SpaceX are talking about sending space tourists around the Moon. I think that might be a few more years away than is being talked about. And again, we haven’t seen details of the space training Axiom have talked about that.
dearMoon founder Yusaku Maezawa and Space X founder Elon Musk
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:58:41] Elon Musk is partnering with Yusaku Maezawa founder of the dearMoon initiative. Eight artists have been invited to be astronauts on that mission? And that’s underway, isn’t it? There will be training involved.
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:59:03] Yes, again there’s not been any public discussion about the training. Well, let’s see. You know, if you had a two horse race and you said one person is prepared for this race and done all of the necessary training and the other none, you’d put your money on the jockey who’d trained.
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [00:59:34] I think we need to see more. You know, collectively, you cannot just expect to go into space and for it all be “hunky dory”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. Even the most robust individuals get a sensation of being space sick – for anything between one to three days.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [00:59:52] And so you’ve mentioned a number of categories in terms of the end user of the training courses. Have you costed out per person how much that would cost within the different across the different categories?
Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and Space X
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [01:00:10] We have within reason, obviously, we’re waiting to see what the market plays out like. So, for instance, Blue Origin haven’t announced what their pricing will be for their potential suborbital experience. We know that Virgin Galactic has already released pricing details about their trip, the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin. They are keeping that fairly much under wraps. And so we’re choosing to do the same. Astronaut training at the moment is about 18 months and, you know, an order of tens of millions of dollars, pounds, euros to accomplish. I would have thought in the same way that SpaceX completely put on its head, the price of a rocket launch and the price per kilo of material going up into space, we would be looking to change by an order of magnitude, the cost of training and individual government or private to go into space.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [01:01:04] So they’re not figures that you particularly would like to talk about at the moment?
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [01:01:08] Not at the moment.
Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme: [01:01:09] OK. And it’s been wonderful talking to you, John Vickers. And just before we go, is there anything else that you would like to inform the audience of?
Innovate UK
John Vickers, founder of Blue Abyss: [01:01:24] Thank you very much indeed for your time. The U.K.is a fantastically inventive nation with a population who just need to believe in themselves a bit more. And globally, when you get initiatives like putting humans on the Moon. I think people’s propensity is not to talk about the political divide or about from which country they come, but it’s to talk about humanity, the greater, more noble cause about the excitement that that builds for humanity. I just want to be part of that initiative. Humanity has got a great opportunity. We are living together. Let’s start working together more collectively. It’s a shame that in the 21st century we’ve still got such at times isolationist and politically charged agendas when I think there is an opportunity to step beyond that. When we leave the earth behind, perhaps we will eventually be able to leave some of the politics with it.
[01:02:24] John Vickers, thank you very much for moving the human story forward, as we say on this show. It’s an absolute pleasure talking to you. [01:02:32] Thank you. Thank you very much indeed.Credit: Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme. If you enjoyed this interview, please check out ideaXme’s interview with Veteran Astronaut Nicole Stott.
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