fixable, and Triton’s onboard team—the same engineers and techni-
cians who built the sub—had toiled furiously for 36 hours to get it ready.
Vescovo assured the room that he was comfortable. Limiting Factor
might be missing its mechanical arm, and the ballast system wasn’t
working as precisely as he’d like, but the core features—its ability to
go to the bottom and come back, its life-support functions—were all
A-OK. “I feel that the vessel is safe enough to try,” he said. “It’s a cal-
culated risk, but I’ve taken greater risks. So this is...reasonable.”
“...he says, before descending to eight and a half thousand meters,”
joked Rob McCallum, the Five Deeps expedition leader. More than any-
one on board, McCallum understood the magnitude of the ambition,
and just how much the team had accomplished to get to this point. He
is a rare specialist in deep-sea submersible operations; he led the test
program for James Cameron’s expedition to Challenger Deep, as well
as multiple visits to the Titanic and Bismarck wrecks using Russia’s Mir
subs. Since those Mirs were withdrawn from service after 2005, there
hasn’t been any commercially available craft on the planet that could
reach Titanic, which lies near 3,800 meters. If all went well here, Limiting
Fa c t o r would prove to have that ability, and a whole lot more.
“We have all been working very long and hard to get to this point,”
McCallum said. “Conditions are perfect. The boys are very confident
in the sub. I don’t want anyone to stress. The plan is pretty simple.”
Straight down, then straight back up.
After lunch, Vescovo was on his way, plunging through the depths.
The ride down took about three hours, and he poked around on the
floor for an hour, just to see how the sub managed at such extreme
depths. Surfacing was slightly quicker, about two hours.
While Vescovo was underwater, people in Pressure Drop’s cramped
control room monitored their screens and waited for scheduled
voice checks, which became noisier and harder to make out after
Limiting Factor passed 6,000 meters. This made Lahey even more
nervous, but his chief electrical engineer had anticipated the issue
and assured him that Vescovo was fine.
Finally, around sunset, Limiting Factor popped to the surface and
bobbed, awaiting recovery. McCallum zipped over in an inflatable
Zodiac boat to drop off Triton’s rescue diver, who swam to the sub
and attached a tether connecting it to Pressure Drop. Then he opened
the hatch so Vescovo could climb out and breathe the fresh air. He
pumped a fist and yelled: “One down!”
hen Victor Vescovo went looking for someone to build
a sub that could repeatedly carry him to the bottom of
the sea, he didn’t have a lot of options. If you eliminate
defense contractors that build military vessels, there are
only a handful of companies that service the private sec-
tor. And that market is almost entirely for vehicles that go down a few
hundred feet to let tourists gawk at sharks and rays.
Vescovo settled on Triton, a Florida-based manufacturer that
claimed on its website to be developing a commercially rated, full-
ocean-depth sub. This wasn’t exactly right. The company was working
on such a vessel in the sense that Lahey wanted to make one. He just
8
,^3
7
6
M
E
T
E
R
S
In 1876, the British
measured the Puerto
Rico Trench by lowering a
hemp line. To identify the
Atlantic’s deepest point,
the Five Deeps crew used
advanced, multibeam
echo-sounding sonar.
—Marion RenaultDive 1: Atlantic
POPSCI.COM•FALL 2019 51ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARTINA ELISA CECCHIx 10
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Khalifas* The Burj Khalifa is the world’s
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