The 1984 film The NeverEnding Story opens with a bullied boy who forgets his troubles when he reads about an alternative world called Fantasia. So it is tempting to ask whether a new private research vessel, named after one of the characters from the film, can offer hard-pressed oceanographers a similar escape.

As we report on page 420, the R/V Falkor has launched into troubled waters for marine science. Ship time is hard to come by, and funds for academic ocean research are shrinking, at least in the United States. More than ever, researchers are needing to cobble together money from several sources to pay for voyages that, in the past, might have been funded through one overarching grant.

Arriving at a rate of knots on this scene are private foundations. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in Palo Alto, California, for instance, has a marine-microbiology initiative that explores sites ranging from coastal upwellings to deep-sea sediments. But it does not accept unsolicited proposals from scientists.

The non-profit Schmidt Ocean Institute, which operates the Falkor from its base in Palo Alto, does. It is open to applications to use the ship — for free — for studies that highlight the challenges that the world’s oceans face. The money comes from institute founder Eric Schmidt, former chief executive of Google.

Many researchers are sceptical about the genuine scientific value of millionaire marine philanthropy. It is fashionable to send well-equipped expeditions to little-known parts of the sea, but such efforts seldom connect with the wider scientific community — although film director James Cameron said this week that he would donate his DEEPSEA CHALLENGER submersible to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts. The Falkor, however, is meant to be a long-term resource for use by anyone who can get his or her proposal accepted by a peer-review panel.

The ship deliberately has no home port, so as to keep away from territorial claims to one ocean basin or for one country. US and Canadian scientists are scheduled to lead its first few cruises, but that is mainly an artefact of how the Schmidt institute started up. Its programme managers personally visited leading oceanographers in those countries to introduce the Falkor and to encourage them to apply for ship time. Non-Americans seem to be taking note; in the latest round of proposals, scientists from 23 countries applied.

The Falkorsignals the future of oceanography in other ways. It is, at heart, a Google ship, and as such promotes projects that integrate the latest technology into ocean exploration. Some academic outfits, such as the WHOI, already push this limit, but the Google crew has some ideas of its own and scientists will follow them eagerly. The Schmidt institute also prods its shipboard scientists to release their data openly and rapidly, following the strong precedent set by the Moore foundation.

A small ship such as the Falkor will not solve all the woes of oceanographers. One possible stumbling block is that the Schmidt institute awards only ship time; scientists must come up with their own funding to pay salaries and for post-cruise science. Thus, only researchers who are accomplished enough to secure funding from other sources will be able to spend time aboard.

The Falkor has much to offer, but it will not and should not replace the current US research fleet, which is due to receive much-needed upgrades over the next ten years that will allow it to push the boundaries of marine science further than ever before.

The NeverEnding Story was a joint project of film-makers in Germany and the United States. The Falkor was originally a German fishery-protection vessel. With fair seas and a following wind, its story has some way to run yet.