Towards the end of 2009, French architect Jacques Rougerie unveiled a prototype for a vertical ship, the first of its kind: the oceanographic station SeaOrbiter. He already has  the 35 million euros needed to build it, besides the support of a French shipyard and the president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, not to mention the first French astronaut, Jean-Loup Chrétien on board as a consultant.

It is a new way of exploring the depths of the sea, allowing researchers to remain underwater as long as they need (at 51 meters, partially submerged, it allows for direct observation of the ocean depths), and can move around the oceans (the station is mobile, like a ship).
 
More than this, the SeaOrbiter breaks with the horizontal standard of ship building, leading it to inspire new advances in the shipbuilding industry. One of these is the anti-collision system, based on the one at the International Space Station. 

International navigation has furnished us with other interesting examples. One that springs to mind is a ship with the ability to submerge its deck, with just the bow and stern above the water, for an oil exploration platform or other similar floating structures to be placed on board: traction keeps the platform afloat above the submerged ship, which rises to the surface with the help of a water-pumping system in the hold. Once back on the surface, it becomes a regular ship once again, ready to transport the equipment to its destination. I was on board such a vessel in the 1980s, in the Brazilian port of São Sebastião, in the state of São Paulo.

In the early 1990s I saw a ship that needed just one crew member, for this ultra-modern Scandinavian container carrier could be controlled with a common or garden video-game joystick, and, with the aid of television cameras, the captain-pilot would have control of all the important angles of vision. 

After this, we had ships with equipment controlled by voice (the only thing missing being for the computer to perfect its recognition of a captain’s voice, even when he has a cold...). Telecommand would allow a ship to be controlled from inside a ship owner’s office, like an unmanned spacecraft.  The system missed being adopted because even the most modern systems are not immune to faults and breakdowns, like that which caused some spacecraft to break up on the surface of Mars because someone had confused metres with feet...and they only discovered three years later, when a craft arrived on a neighbouring planet and was smashed to pieces, instead of staying in the planned orbit... 

And the reason for all these comments on curiosities of the sea and air is that the world is waiting for a new creative leap from ship builders, and not just more of the same. The demand is for more efficient vessels, which can dispense with polluting bunker oil, able to meet new necessities not only in cargo transport but in the supply of real time information on such transport to customers. 

Communication technology and aerodynamic techniques to improve efficiency are available on the market, but these are improvements on what already exists, and this is not enough. It is to be hoped that over the next few years ship builders will offer us new ideas for merchant shipping, like the submersible ship of the 1980s, the joystick from the following decade, or the vertical ship of today.

That’s the challenge.