34 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
how he wants things to be, and a dozen
or so men in Florida start building.
Ramsay, who works out of a spare
bedroom in the wilds of southwest En-
gland, has never read a book about sub-
marines. “You would just end up totally
tainted in the way you think,” he said.
“I just work out what it’s got to do, and
then come up with a solution to it.” The
success or the failure of Vescovo’s mis-
sion would rest largely in his hands.
“If Victor dies, and it’s your fault,
you’ve got to kill yourself,” he told his
wife, Caroline.
“Would you, though?” she replied.
“Of course!”
A submariner thinks of space and
materials in terms of pressure, buoyancy,
and weight. Air rises, batteries sink; in
order to achieve neutral buoyancy—the
ability to remain suspended underwater,
without rising or falling—each compo-
nent must be offset against the others.
The same is true of fish, which regulate
their buoyancy through the inflation and
deflation of swim bladders.
Ramsay’s submarines typically cen-
ter on a thick acrylic sphere, essentially
a bubble; release it underwater and it
will pop right up to the surface. But
acrylic was not strong enough for Ves-
covo’s submersible. At the bottom of
the deepest trench, every square inch
would have to hold back sixteen thou-
sand pounds of water—an elephant
standing on a stiletto heel.
Ramsay settled on titanium: mallea-
ble and resistant to corrosion, with a high
ratio of strength to density. The pressure
hull would weigh nearly eight thousand
pounds. It would have to be counterbal-
anced by syntactic foam, a buoyant filler
comprising millions of hollow glass
spheres. For the submarine to stay up-
right, the foam would have to go above
the hull, providing upward lift—like a
hot-air balloon, for water. “As long as the
heavy stuff hangs in balance below the
buoyant stuff, the sub will always stay up-
right,” Ramsay explained.
The hull required the forging of two
slabs of titanium into perfect hemi-
spheres. Only one facility in the world
had a chamber that was sufficiently large
and powerful to subject the hull to pres-
sures equivalent to those found at full
ocean depth: the Krylov State Research
Center, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Lahey
attended the pressure test. There was
no backup hull; an implosion would end
the project. “But it worked—it validated
what we were doing,” Lahey told me.I
t was the middle of summer, 2018, in
South Florida, and Triton’s techni-
cians were working fifteen hours a day,
in a space with no air-conditioning. Lahey
paced the workshop, sweating, trying toencourage his team. The men who were
building the world’s most advanced
deep-diving submersible had not at-
tended Stanford or M.I.T.; they were
former car mechanics, scuba instructors,
and underwater welders, hired for their
work ethic and their practical experience.
The shop foreman used to be a truck
driver. The hydraulics expert had a bul-
let in his abdomen, from his days run-
ning cocaine out of Fort Lauderdale, in
the eighties. One of the electricians honed
his craft by stealing car radios, as a teen-
ager. (“I was really good at it,” he told
me.) Lahey, for his part, said that he was
named—and later exonerated—by the
federal government as an unindicted co-
conspirator in a narcotics-trafficking op-
eration involving a Soviet military sub-
marine and a Colombian cartel.
Every major component of Vesco-
vo’s submarine had to be developed from
scratch. The oil-and-gas industry had
established a supply chain of compo-
nents that are pressure-rated to around
six thousand metres—but that was only
half the required depth. Before assem-
bling the submarine, the Triton team
spent months imploding parts in a pres-
sure chamber, and sending feedback to
the manufacturers. “You’re solving prob-
lems that have never existed before, with
parts that have never existed before,
from venders who don’t know how to
make them,” Ramsay said.
The rest of the expedition team was
on a ship docked in the harbor at Vero
Beach, waiting. Vescovo remained at home
in Dallas, training on a simulator that
Triton had rigged up in his garage. On
Lahey’s recommendation, he had hired
Rob McCallum, an expedition leader and
a co-founder of Eyos Expeditions, to in-
ject realism into a project that might oth-
erwise die a dream.
For every Vescovo who goes to the
South Pole, there is a McCallum making
sure he stays alive. (McCallum has been
to Antarctica a hundred and twenty-
eight times.) “I love it when clients come
through the door and say, ‘I’ve been told
this is impossible, but what do you
think?’” he said to me. “Well, I think
you’ve just given away your negotiating
position. Let’s have a glass of wine and
talk about it.”
McCallum—who is trim but barrel-
chested, with a soft voice and a Kiwi ac-
cent—grew up in the tropics of Papua“It sure looks like spring, but I’ll check my hibernation app.”