Reaching the Five Deeps with Victor Vescovo

A conversation at the Adventurers’ Club of Los Angeles

Introduction

Rich Mayfield: Welcome to the Adventurers’ Club of Los Angeles. My name is Rich Mayfield, member 1211. I’m here tonight with Victor Vescovo. Victor, thank you so much for coming. We appreciate you coming out. We’re here tonight to talk about your Five Deeps Expedition, but I want to start by getting to know who you are first and how you got to this point. We always like to bring it back to the beginning—what gave you the bug to be an explorer or an adventurer? What was the first thing that you did?

The Explorer’s DNA

Victor Vescovo: As a human being, I was born. I think it’s genetic. There are some interesting discussions during our expedition—we had some expedition doctors, and there is some literature out there saying that human beings fall on the spectrum of how adventurous they are. There are some people that are very conservative in how they live, and then there are the ones that want to know what’s on the other side of that hill, and the one after, and the one after. Maybe we’re the expendable ones that push us forward a bit, but I think I was born with all the copies of that gene.

The most dangerous thing that happened to me when I was young was my parents giving me my first bicycle when I was six—and that’s the last they saw of me for a while. I was born and raised in Texas. I’m a proud Texan. Being nice and flat allowed me to go for quite a distance.

Mayfield: How many people do you think are on the spectrum of adventure at your level in the world?

Vescovo: At my level? God help them. I would say a fraction of a percent. There’s also the issue of risk-taking—there’s a very fine line between being really adventurous and being a successful explorer or adventurer, versus being reckless. Probably the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done in my life was high altitude mountaineering for several decades. It’s a very fine line between having a good summit day and not coming back. One of the key elements of adventure and exploring is being an absolute expert at risk management. If you don’t do that correctly, you’re just playing Russian roulette. That’s why I always come back.

From Navy Intelligence to Business

Mayfield: Your resume kind of started with your Navy career. Did you join the Navy immediately after college or high school?

Vescovo: The Navy thing kind of happened on the side. I was heavily involved in mountain climbing in my 20s and 30s. I was approached to join the Navy when I was in business school in Boston. I speak a couple of languages; I’d done some mathematical simulations of warfare when I was at MIT. The Navy contacted me and said, “Hey, we have this interesting program for guys like you. Would you like to get a commission and be an intelligence officer in the reserve?”

Twenty years later, I had been in the Navy for 20 years. The first 10 years I was a targeting officer—involved in the war in Kosovo and in Iraq with Carrier Air Wing 9 off the Nimitz. Then 9/11 happened, and for the next 10 years, especially because one of my languages is Arabic, I went into counterterrorism.

Mayfield: So the Navy was a side career? What was your primary career?

Vescovo: My primary career was business. I started as a management consultant, then eventually went into private equity—taking other people’s money and trying to make more of it by doing heavy industrial investments. My first big achievement was, of course, being in Texas—an oil and gas company that did very well. That allowed me to found a private equity firm with another individual, and we did very well. That allowed me to pursue my other passion: more intensive explorations.

The Explorers Grand Slam and the Turn to the Depths

Mayfield: So you did the Explorers Grand Slam—you hiked every mountain on every continent and skied to the North and South Poles. At that point, were you looking for a new venture?

Vescovo: In a way. Mountaineering, when you do it a lot—I got invited to go to K2, and that’s when you have to start asking, “Am I a professional or not? What is the risk I’m willing to take?” I was getting older, and mountain climbing in some respects is a young person’s game. It starts getting dangerous when your body isn’t quite the same as it was in its late 20s and early 30s.

So I said, what’s a different adventure? Maybe I could do a complete 180—what’s kind of symmetrical to going up high? I could go down low.

Then I heard about Richard Branson, who had what he called the Five Dives Project—to go to the bottom of all five of the world’s oceans. But the technology he chose was not appropriate. It was carbon fiber with a quartz crystal canopy, and the project was abandoned.

I was sitting at my home in Dallas one day, and I kind of studied it. I said, we have the technology to go to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The Trieste did it in 1960, James Cameron did in 2012. We could do this. Why isn’t it being done?

So I got a spreadsheet together, talked to some people, did some research, and said this is actually doable—but you have to build a new submersible and fund it. Fortunately, I had the means to do that. I made the commitment. I said, “If not me, who? No government’s even trying to do this.”

The Challenge of Challenger Deep

Mayfield: Is the issue that the submersibles weren’t reusable?

Vescovo: Let’s talk about Challenger Deep. That is one of the most brutal points on the planet—16,000 pounds per square inch. It’s like four automobiles on your fingernail, on every single surface of the submersible. Freezing temperatures. Corrosive saltwater.

You can go into space, and with enough oxygen supplies, you can stay in space for years. You cannot stay at the bottom of the ocean more than about 6 to 12 hours—it is slowly destroying the craft. That’s why the Trieste only went down once. Deep Sea Challenger went down once.

We were trying to develop a submersible that could do it repeatedly and safely, which would allow us to go anywhere in the world. I’m motivated by technology. I like to push technology forward. I really wanted to build a door so that human beings could go anywhere on the sea floor, repeatedly and safely. That was the real drive. And I’m a pilot, so I wanted to pilot the damn thing.

Trusting the Math

Mayfield: How do you even get to the point where you can say this is safe enough for manned travel when it’s never been down there before?

Vescovo: Math. You just really have to trust the math. A reporter once asked me if I was a really religious person, if I had religious transformations on my experiences. I said, “Not really. I really believe in two things: mathematics and titanium.”

The finite element analysis—the mathematical simulation of materials and structures under stress in silico—allowed us to have very high confidence that it would survive. The first time my submersible, the Limiting Factor, dove to the bottom of Challenger Deep was the first time it had ever been fully assembled and dove to that depth. There is no pressure chamber on Earth large enough to test the full system. We had to test all the components—but not all together. That, in some respects, is the real trick. And I was in it, because I trusted the math, I trusted the engineers, and we had a lot of backups.

Mayfield: What is your degree of confidence to do something that dangerous?

Vescovo: I said 90%. They said, “So you’re willing to take a one in ten risk that you don’t come back, and you’d say okay?” I said yeah. But it’s the first one that’s 90/10. Once it had done it and came back, you tear it apart, look at what went right and wrong—the confidence interval goes up. Just like an aircraft: the first time you fly an experimental aircraft is the most dangerous time. After 10 or 12 times, it’s not as dangerous.

The Limiting Factor

Mayfield: Tell us about the submersible design.

Vescovo: It started with two brilliant British designers—John Ramsay and Tom Blades. They designed it so it could go up and down in the water efficiently. That’s why it looks the way it does—it doesn’t look like a conventional submarine. It was primarily designed to do one thing: survive repeated journeys to the bottom of the ocean.

The two individuals that designed it did not have a formal education in submarine design, but they had an incredible background in materials science and electronic systems. They took the requirements I gave them and designed the optimal solution. The fundamental requirement was going down—not moving forward like a torpedo.

Mayfield: You named it the Limiting Factor?

Vescovo: The limiting factor was how to design systems that could survive the beating it took at ultimate depth—the gaskets, the small interfaces. Those are always the weak points. That pressure over time will find the weakest point. If you have a thousand points of vulnerability, nature will immediately go to the weakest one and start pounding it.

But the name actually comes from a starship in my favorite science fiction series, The Culture, by Scottish author Iain Banks. The ships that Elon Musk lands the Falcon 9 rockets on are also named from the same series.

The Titanium Sphere

Mayfield: In the center is this titanium sphere. How much was that?

Vescovo: The titanium sphere was about $12 million. The total cost of the submersible was $35 million—so a little less than half just for the sphere.

The first submarine that went down, the Trieste, used a two-person sphere made of steel—which is why it was enormous. It actually used gasoline as buoyancy because gasoline is lighter than saltwater. But it couldn’t move.

James Cameron’s Deep Sea Challenger was also steel—cheaper, but he had to be small. Jim was literally like this for the entire journey because they couldn’t make it bigger.

I wanted to have a pilot and a scientist on board. They said that would be a lot harder—we couldn’t use steel; it would be enormous. We settled on titanium. The biggest issue is it’s really hard to machine, and incredibly expensive. So I wrote the check.

Testing in Russia

Mayfield: Where did you test the pressure vessel?

Vescovo: There’s only one place in the world we could pressure test it—the Krylov Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia. And that was at a sketchy time.

We actually put the pressure vessel in a container in Poland. We drove it there on a Friday. We paid in cash. We tested it on a Saturday and got it out on a Sunday.

Mayfield: Were you worried they would keep it?

Vescovo: We were extremely worried they were going to keep it or put a million-dollar export tax on it. We didn’t know we had the pressure vessel back until they cracked open the container in Florida and there it was. We thought it could have been a lot of bricks.

It was tested to 20% greater than about 14,000 meters. There was so much energy in the system that they said if there had been a catastrophic failure, it would have leveled the entire building. It was the deepest they had ever tested anything.

Mayfield: How much did that cost? Did you have insurance?

Vescovo: Are you serious? This was so non-insurable it was ridiculous. This was all cash on a weekend. It was a bunch of Russian guys trying to make money to pay the light bill—they didn’t want their own authorities finding out about it.

Design Philosophy: “Laws of Physics Would Have to Be Violated”

Vescovo: The other key design requirement I gave them was: “The laws of physics would have to be violated for me not to come back.” I had to struggle to figure out ways for the submersible to fail so that I could not come back.

The most dangerous dive I probably did was at the Titanic. People ask why—it’s not that deep. The most risky thing in a submersible is entanglement. At the Titanic, you have strong currents that can be stronger than the maximum power output of the submersible. The wreck is big—lots of potential areas to get impaled. It has lots of cables and ropes. We’re always trying to get closer for the best video.

The submersible was designed where everything had to be ejectable if it could become entangled—the thrusters, the manipulator arm. But if that happened, your life depends on a single switch working. You never want to put yourself in that position.

I made a mistake diving the Titanic solo. You need two pairs of eyes—one looking at the sonar and position, another looking at the hazards. Doing both in a strong current was incredibly stressful. I never did it again.

Mayfield: Did you hit the Titanic?

Vescovo: According to the Federal Government, yes. I bumped a railing—it was on video. I was hauled into Federal Court in Norfolk, Virginia before a judge to explain myself. The only time I’ve ever been prosecuted for a moving violation was when I hit the Titanic with my submersible.

The judge looked disgusted and said, “Really? That’s it? You’re dismissed.”

The Five Deeps Expedition

The expedition mapped and dove to the deepest points of all five oceans:

1. Puerto Rico Trench (Atlantic Ocean) - First solo dive
2. South Sandwich Trench (Southern Ocean) - Completely virgin territory
3. Java Trench (Indian Ocean) - Permit complications with Indonesia
4. Challenger Deep (Pacific Ocean) - The ultimate test
5. Molloy Deep (Arctic Ocean)

Lost Communications at 4,000 Meters

Vescovo: In the Southern Ocean, at 4,000 meters, I lost all communications with the surface because of a very thick thermocline—a temperature differential in the water. It cut off all acoustic communications.

The standard procedure in submarines is if you lose communications for more than 30 minutes, you come up. But this was a special situation. We were in a very remote place. It was the one day we were able to dive. I asked myself, “When am I coming back to the Southern Ocean?”

So I made the call to keep going down. Everything else was fine with the sub—I just couldn’t talk to the surface. I didn’t really need them anyway; I was autonomous. I got down to about 6,500 meters, got to the bottom, stayed for one hour, came back up, and at 4,000 meters got comms again.

They were really upset with me when I got to the surface. Although one of the engineers took me aside later that night and said, “I knew you were okay.” I asked how. He said, “If you had imploded, we would have heard it.”

The deepest point in the Southern Ocean is now named The Factoran Deep after the submarine.

The First Dive to Challenger Deep

Mayfield: Take us through a dive.

Vescovo: The whole process is very methodical. I’ve been a pilot since I was 19. I stressed over and over again: I want every single dive to be as boring as possible. Checklist after checklist. Make your plan, stick to it. Things happen and you adapt—just like being in a plane.

The day before, I personally inspected the sub, checking every gasket, every potential major failure point. I did it myself. It’s how you fly.

They lower you in the water, tow you right over the point where you want to dive. You go through the checklist. They say “You’re clear to dive.” You open the buoyancy tanks, water comes in, and very gently it starts slowly going into the water. After about 5 feet, it accelerates to about 1.3 meters per second, and you start dropping pretty rapidly.

At about 1,000 meters, it starts getting dark. After 1,000 meters, it’s completely dark.

At 6,000 meters, photons cannot go below that. When you’re looking out of the viewports below 6,000 meters, you are looking into absolute void. It actually gives you a bit of vertigo. It’s almost like the Nietzsche thing—“Be careful when you’re staring into the abyss; the abyss is looking back into you.”

Sounds in the Deep

Vescovo: The first couple of dives, it sounded awful because I didn’t know my craft. Every plane, every vehicle, even your own car—they all have their own unique sounds. Every time my submersible made a sound when I was first test flying it, it freaked me out.

Don Walsh told me: “If you ever hear anything in a deep diving submersible, you’re okay. It’s when you don’t that you’re not going to come back.”

There was a funny situation where the pressure capsule was bolted together, wrapped with a steel cable under very high tension to keep it in perfect sphericity. On one dive, past 7,000 feet, it was very quiet—fans circulating air to get rid of carbon dioxide, a couple of whooshing sounds. Then out of nowhere, right under me, I heard this big THUMP.

I didn’t know what it was until I brought it back up. It was the cable compressing in a stepwise function. After that, whenever I took a passenger down, I wouldn’t tell them it was coming. About half the time it happened. It was kind of funny when it did.

Life at the Bottom of the Mariana Trench

Vescovo: I got to the very bottom of the Mariana Trench on my first dive. I’m like, “Oh my God, this is awesome. I’m still here. The craft works. It’s in great condition.” So I just tooled around for four hours, cruising around the bottom of the Mariana Trench because it was fun. It looks like the moon, but I felt like I was seven years old again.

We recovered the first rock from the Sirena Deep at about 10,900 meters. When we put it under an electron microscope, we saw colonies of bacteria. This is life existing without photosynthesis—they’re living off chemosynthesis, taking the methane and chemicals from the rocks. That’s providing their entire existence.

If there’s life on other planets, it’s going to look more like that than it does up here on land.

Vescovo: Every single dive we made into the deep trenches, we discovered new species. Because no one had ever been there, and they’d been developing for 40 million years.

The Fire at 10,800 Meters

Vescovo: I hold the record for the deepest fire in a submersible. That happened at the Tonga Trench at 10,800 meters.

I was down there on the bottom for 15 minutes, exploring, and all of a sudden all hell broke loose. Alarm after alarm, lights flashing. I was alone in the sub, four hours from the surface.

The first thing that goes to your mind is: what is causing this massive cascade of failures? I guessed right—a battery had gotten some saltwater ingress and was melting down, dumping a couple of kilovolts into the system, melting the submarine right outside the pressure capsule.

I shut it down and tried to isolate it before it could bleed into all the other circuits and cause a complete failure. I came back up. They said, “When we open the hatch, you’re going to smell a lot of burning stuff.”

When I breached the surface, the fire started again.

But the fire showed where the weak point in the sub was. We went hard after that for the next month and solved that problem. That’s what you find through real-world testing.

The Indonesia Incident

Vescovo: The biggest barrier to deep ocean exploration is not the technology, it’s not even the money—it’s government permitting.

The Indonesians said the Java Trench was within their exclusive economic zone. They said we needed a permit. For a year and a half I worked with them. Everything was great, all smiles, permit was coming.

We got right over the deepest point in the Indian Ocean. Still no permit. I had to make the call: do we dive or not?

According to the UN Law of the Sea, you do not need a permit if all you’re doing is going down and coming back up—you’re testing your equipment, you’re a tourist, you’re not touching anything.

So I got in the sub, drove to the bottom of the Java Trench. The next day, the Indonesians transmitted that our permit had been denied on national security grounds—that we had violated their sovereignty. Several months later, they passed a law making it a crime in Indonesia to do what we did.

So now I was a pirate. We couldn’t go back to Indonesia. We literally looked at the map—we only had a third of our fuel left, during the height of COVID. We ended up going to East Timor, that old Portuguese pirate haven.

That night, I came out on deck and the crew had hung a pirate flag off the back of the ship.

Private Sector vs. Government

Vescovo: Let me give you an example of the efficiency and speed of private sector versus government.

I was sitting at my desk in Dallas one day, working on business stuff. I got a call from Triton: “There’s a detail we need to nail—where do you want the stick shift that controls the maneuverability of the sub?”

We talked about it for 15 minutes. Some rough pros and cons. Made a decision. Done.

How long would that have taken in government? How many committees to decide where to put the primary control mechanism for a $35 million submersible? It would have taken months. More time, more money, and it probably would have been suboptimal—a decision made by committee.

That’s the difference at the most fundamental level between private sector and government. But this was extraordinary because I was not only the person writing the checks, I was setting the requirements, and I was the pilot. That’s a really tight decision cycle. That’s why you’re able to do things quickly and effectively.

Motivating Engineers

Vescovo: The best way ever to motivate engineers is a little secret I learned. If an engineer ever gave me “Oh, I’m not sure we can do that…”

I’d say, “That’s okay, I know this other team. I think they have a way to do it.”

“No no no, we got it.”

They won’t sleep for 5 days to get it done. And that’s what I needed, and that’s what we got done.

When you’re doing something that’s breaking barriers, that’s what every engineer lives for—to build something that’s never been built before, doing something extreme. And God forbid you say someone else might be able to do it better.

The Total Cost

Mayfield: What was the total cost of the entire project for four years?

Vescovo: A lot more. The dirty secret of deep ocean exploration: the cost of the vessels is extremely high. The operations and maintenance of a 24/7 operation for marine exploration is extremely high. Which is why it’s so rare.

Mayfield: In terms of what you can spend $100 million on, this is definitely one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard of.

Vescovo: And it’s more effective. If the government had done it, it would have cost four or five times as much. I was amazed that I was the one that did it. I kept saying, there are so many people so much wealthier than I am that could have done this. But they just didn’t do it. No imagination, I guess.

The Legacy: Passing the Torch

Vescovo: I was very thankful that Gabe Newell, the American billionaire who founded the Steam gaming network, bought my entire system, hired my entire crew, and has funneled an enormous amount of money into the exact same system. They’re diving in the Pacific and Antarctic doing science missions.

Now that allows me the liberty to learn from everything we did for four years and try to develop the next generation submersible that will be even more capable than the Limiting Factor.

The 202nd Dive

Mayfield: How many times has the Limiting Factor been down?

Vescovo: It has been down to the bottom of the ocean 202 times. The titanium sphere, the pressure hull, is designed to withstand up to 10,000 dives. But we had to replace certain components after every 5-10 dives.

DNV, the German-Norwegian firm that certified the submersible, said after every deep dive you have to log it. When you get to 25, you have to tear it apart and check everything.

I asked, “What counts as a deep dive?” They said about 4,000 meters.

So all of our dives to the Titanic didn’t even count—it wasn’t deep enough.

The Next Frontier

Vescovo: I have a list of all the things I would change about the original design.

The next submersible I’m developing would have new technology the Limiting Factor doesn’t have:

• A sonar system that can look out 5 to 10 times further
• Instead of a hydraulic manipulator arm, I’m investing with universities to develop one based on carbon fiber and artificial muscle that’s electrically stimulated—impervious to pressure
• 8K resolution cameras outside the sub with a direct fiber optic feed to a curvilinear display that matches the hull—basically a virtual window. They have that on the F-35 fighter. I want to put it in a submersible.

There are about 23 deep ocean trenches in the world. I’ve done 17. The other six are really bothering me.

Ocean Mapping: The Last Great Exploration

Vescovo: I love ocean mapping. I think it’s the last great exploration on planet Earth—and it’s true exploration. We don’t know it.

75% of the seafloor is completely unmapped. If you do the math, half of planet Earth is still completely unexplored.

I’m developing a ship that would probably be the most efficient deep ocean mapping vessel ever constructed. I’m also using satellites now to map coastal areas—that’s something new. We can use satellites to map coastal areas to a depth of 30 meters. Just last year, we were able to map a quarter of a million square kilometers of coastal areas that had never been mapped before.

Beyond the Ocean: Asteroids, Biotech, and the Woolly Mammoth

Vescovo: On the private investor side, I’m CEO of a biomedical company trying to cure incurable diseases using artificial viruses that can get into the human nervous system.

I’m an investor in Colossal Biosciences—we’re trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth. Hopefully we’ll do that in three or four years. Really, it’s about developing the technology to manipulate DNA to conserve every species that exists now and may have existed in the recent past.

I’m also involved in asteroid mining here in LA. I’m an investor in AstroForge. We’re sending a probe—the deepest space probe ever sent by a commercial company—launched next month on a Falcon 9 rocket to do a flyby of an asteroid heavy in metals.

It’s not a question of if but when we end up mining asteroids. It’s an engineering problem at this point. We do not need to invent any new technologies to commercially mine asteroids—it’s a cost issue and an engineering issue.

As Neil deGrasse Tyson said, the first trillionaire is going to be the person that figures out how to mine asteroids—because it will completely change the economics of so many things.

Philosophy: Why People Don’t Reach Their Full Potential

Audience Member: You’ve mentioned that most people fail to live to their full potential. What do you think is the biggest impediment?

Vescovo: I firmly believe the vast majority of people come nowhere near their full potential. There are three major reasons:

1. Laziness - Human beings are creatures of comfort. We just want to survive. When we get to a nice level of comfort, so much is lost.

2. Fear - Huge fear of failure, of not doing the right thing, of wasting resources.

3. Lack of self-discipline - I think the greatest virtue a human being can have is self-discipline. If you can control your mind and how your mind thinks, you can do anything. You just have to point it where you want to go.

People ask me how I could do so much. I just decided to do these things. I wasn’t afraid of failure. And I saw them through. It’s persistence that gets you through all that. But really, it starts with self-discipline.

“Control your mind and you can control your reality.” That’s from my favorite science fiction book of all time—Dune. That’s a fundamental precept of that whole series.

On Risk and Investment

Audience Member: Do you find it hard balancing your business mind and your explorer mind?

Vescovo: What’s extraordinary is how much they all rhyme—business, investment, extreme exploration, even war. They’re different, but they rhyme. They can be reduced to basic principles, math, and risk analysis.

Making an investment, studying a battlefield, going to dive in a new place—what’s the first thing you do? You study the hell out of it. In the military, they call it intelligence preparation of the battlefield. You’re doing the exact same thing in investment or exploration.

Then it becomes about adaptability. When you invest in a company, especially in private equity doing a turnaround, things happen that you did not expect. You have to adapt and change. Same thing on a mountain—weather changes, you’ve got to adapt.

And you’re constantly doing, if you’re doing it correctly, the math on what’s the risk, what’s the reward, what’s my escape plan.

Advice for the Next Generation

Vescovo: Flying is a great discipline. I’m a huge believer in trying to get young people into cockpits because I think it teaches so many different skills about risk analysis, planning, knowing machinery, getting self-confidence.

I give a lot of money to pilot associations because I want to get more kids into cockpits.

One of the first books my parents got me when I was very young was Gould’s World Atlas, and I would just sit there and study maps. I loved maps. I read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne when I was very young—and look what happened.

At the very root core, just encourage kids to read. Get their heads in a book and off the screen.

Final Words: Why Comfort Is the Enemy

Vescovo: There are people with $100 million who buy a party yacht and hang out in the Mediterranean. That sickens me. Have a little more imagination! Get out of your comfort zone!

We’re not put on this Earth to be comfortable, and then when we get comfortable, become even more comfortable, and then want something bigger than the next guy. Get out of that mindset! Use your time to do something effective that advances us as a species—that even puts your own life at risk if you have to.

Because what’s the point? None of us make it out of here alive. We are all living in a teenage horror movie.

One Thing I Love About America

Vescovo: One thing I love about my country, about American culture, especially Texan culture—we are not afraid to fail.

When you fail in the United States, we take it for granted that it’s not that big a deal. In fact, it’s kind of a badge of honor. In so many other cultures, that is not the case. Failure is shame. You don’t want to do that.

But that’s what makes us such a dynamic and energetic people.

I hope we never lose that.

[Applause]