In fact, let me just mention something about the poetry, just because I think it was the one for me that was the most surprising. Whether it was photography as part of a project that students were working on in concert with the company Canon or sharing and filming some of the artwork that school kids had created, or reading some poetry the kids had written specifically for this challenge, that kept me busy for the downward journey and the upward journey. Garriott: I had taken with me a lot of things that I wanted to do on the interior associated with the outreach that I was doing with the schools across the U.S. This one is descending so fast and so far that it becomes truly pitch black outside the viewport mere moments after you depart and so you're falling through the inky blackness for most of the four-hour descent.ĬS: During the descent, do you just sit there for four hours? Is there something to do? Do you take a nap? Most other submarines in the world operate within a few hundred meters of the surface where there is generally still a little bit of light still available. ![]() ![]() The temperature also goes from quite warm on the surface here in the tropics to just right about freezing as you get down into the depths. So you actually feel very comfortable, but the interior diameter only starts at about 1.46 meters and shrinks to about 1.4 meters as the pressure builds on the outside. The 9-centimeter-thick titanium hull is the smallest vehicle I've ever been in, although it felt roomier than a Soyuz because there is less people and material on the inside. They have had to overcome some amazing engineering problems, starting with just how to keep the passengers alive. So to find or create equipment that can operate at double that depth is even harder. To find equipment that can operate at half that depth is already virtually non-existent. Richard Garriott: What's interesting about Limiting Factor is that it's going to more than twice the depth than I'd ever been previously and, as it turns out, that is mightily more difficult. How did the four-hour descent to Challenger Deep compare to some of your other dives, such as to the Titanic and to hydrothermal vents aboard the Russian-built Mir submersibles? This interview has been edited for length and clarity.ĬollectSPACE (cS): Though certainly the deepest, this was not your first dive. Garriott, together with his friend Michael Dubno (who was mid-dive when Garriott called from the surface support ship, the "Pressure Drop"), also brought along their own set of engineering and artistic experiments for the journey.ĬollectSPACE spoke with Garriott about his record-setting dive and the similarities it shared with his other adventures around, and off, the world. Like Sullivan, Garriott made the trip as part of a series of dives aimed at surveying the Mariana Trench and collecting scientific samples. ![]() It was aboard the same submersible with Vescovo as pilot that former NASA astronaut Kathy Sullivan became the first space traveler and first woman to dive to Challenger Deep - in August 2020. ![]() Garriott, who is the incoming president of The Explorers Club, made the dive on board the "Limiting Factor," the first commercially certified, full-ocean-depth deep submergence vehicle that was developed and funded by undersea explorer Victor Vescovo. "I am the first person to go pole to pole, space and deep and the second person - first male - to go space deep," Garriott told collectSPACE in a call while still at sea on Tuesday. The son of a NASA astronaut and a video game pioneer who previously traversed both the North and South poles and funded his own trip to the International Space Station, Garriott completed a dive to Challenger Deep, the lowest point on Earth, on Monday (March 1). Richard Garriott's views of Earth are now as deep as they are wide.
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