Vescovo had been considering what, after Everest and Antarctica, he
could possibly tackle that would feel big enough. Outer space wasn’t re-
ally an option yet. Then he came up with the perfect quest. It would be,
in a sense, the inverse of the Seven Summits. He called it the Five Deeps.
No human has ever reached the bottommost point of all five oceans,
or even tried. And only one person—film director and ocean fanboy
James Cameron—had touched the absolute nadir, Challenger Deep
in the western Pacific’s Mariana Trench, since Lt. Don Walsh and
Jacques Piccard first reached the spot way back on January 23, 1960.
That’s how, in December 2018, Vescovo found himself off Puerto
Rico aboard Pressure Drop, a repurposed U.S. Navy ship, preparing to
take Limiting Factor, the deep-diving submersible he’d commissioned,
to the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, 8,376 meters down. (Meters are
standard in the nautical world; that’s 27,480 feet, or just over 5 miles.)
Limiting Fac tor is the unique creation of Triton Submarines, and the
company’s president, Patrick Lahey, wasn’t thrilled that this unicorn
of a customer—the rich guy who called up and ordered a full-ocean-
depth sub—was determined to go it alone. Lahey urged Vescovo to
dive with a copilot. But this was always a nonstarter.
Vescovo flies planes and helicopters, and he was determined to fly
this craft too. “I told Patrick from the very beginning: ‘I want to take
a submarine to the bottom of all five oceans by myself,’” Vescovo ex-
plained. As an introvert, he prefers being alone. Also, he said, “when you
do something solo, it is materially different. And it’s more rewarding.”
Vescovo has a calm, almost Zen way about him. The Dallas native
wears his graying blond hair long, and speaks softly, even when ex-
cited. But he seemed especially relaxed at the pre-dive meeting that
December morning. He accepted a folded and bagged flag from the
Explorers Club, a society of adventurers focused on promoting field
study. The banner would go with him to the bottom of the Atlantic and
then, if all went well, to the next four deeps, before returning to the
club’s headquarters in New York City.
Overall, though, the mood in the room was
tense. It was the sixth and final day they would
be able to dive in the Puerto Rico Trench be-
fore Vescovo had to get back to business in
Texas. Twice, he had gone for trial runs and
aborted. Once, the hatch leaked. Then, the sub’s
lone mechanical arm, which would pick up ob-
jects of scientific interest from the seafloor,
fell off. Water had also shorted a circuit, caus-
ing a malfunction in the variable ballast system,
which allows the pilot to dump small amounts
of weight during a dive. “It’s just entropy that
can happen when you’re dealing with complex
systems,” Vescovo said. Satellites take shape in
clean rooms to minimize this effect; Limiting
Fa c t o r was built in a 10,000-square-foot
industrial space in Vero Beach, Florida.
Just 48 hours before this meeting, it had seemed
likely the Puerto Rico dive would get scrapped and
rescheduled, throwing the plan to do all five deeps
in a year into chaos. But the issues turned out to beAFTER VICTOR VESCOVO CLIMBED THE SEVEN
Summits—the highest mountain on
each continent—he skied to both the
North and South poles. Only 66 peo-
ple have accomplished this dual feat
of human performance, dubbed the
Explorers’ Grand Slam. When Vescovo
finished, in 2017, he certainly could have
hung up his gear and felt pretty good
about his place in the annals of adven-
ture. But the 53-year-old private equity
investor from Texas was not done.
50 FALL 2019 • POPSCI.COM
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