First U.S. woman to walk in space dives to deepest point in the ocean
npr.org
npr.org
One of my favorite lines from the article:
“And the next day, around lunchtime, everyone went ‘Fuck this, I’ll go for lunch.’ Patrick retrieves a piece of equipment from the deepest point on earth, and it’s just me, going, ‘Yay, congratulations, Patrick.’ No one seemed to notice how big a deal it is that they had already made this normal—even though it’s not. It’s the equivalent of having a daily flight to the moon.”
If you liked that one, you may enjoy this other great NYer article about modern explorers (2018):
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-white-dark...
Edit: Apparently his name really was just "Iain Banks":
"Menzies was supposed to be his middle name, but his father got it wrong on the birth certificate."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/iain-bank...
That’s hardly rational though. After all, if anything goes wrong in the ocean, your buddies can just pull you up. If something goes wrong in space you drift into oblivion. If you are tethered in space and the safety rope breaks its game over. Just as if one was deep in the ocean without positive buoyancy.
And then space itself is all fun and games when in orbit around Earth. If, when facing the planet, you are feeling existentially terrified by there being simultaneously nothing and half of all of the Universe behind you then you can just turn around and have the safety of Earth at your back, at least.
But go deeper into space and that feeling of safety is gone forever. The same universal nothingness and everything-ness is in all directions. Space psychiatrists of the future may recommend we install permanent curtains to deal with this. Only those forced to work outside need experience the terror of the void.
At least you can see past the end of your nose in space. In the deep ocean it’s truly pitch black. Until the squids come.
> At least you can see past the end of your nose in space. In the deep ocean it’s truly pitch black.
Yup, I think it's the darkness and short distance visibility that makes for thalassophobia in most cases, at least it is for me. It scares me when I cannot see the ground, even when I know that it's only a few meters deep. However, I can stand on the top of a building and look down without any fear. BTW, I recommend r/thalassophobia.
> "Vertigo is something other than the fear of falling; it is the desire to fall -- against which, terrified, we defend ourselves."
That's from memory (over 20 years ago) but I think I got it right.
Your eyes tell you it's flat so you can step forward...but your sense of balance tell's you something different..brain is confused, you never have that feeling when your IN the wall.
Space is also open and visibility is great while in the depths there is no light and you can see only a few meters in any directions. Space also does not have "monsters" in it :).
Of course, you need to deal with fast changes in pressure during the short journey towards the surface (protect your eardrums, lungs etc) and you may get decompression sickness depending on the dive time and avg depth at the moment of emergency, but hey, at least you're alive to deal with all those problems!
*: Generally, a scuba diver takes additional weights to counter the positive buoyancy effect of wetsuits, fat etc. These are mounted on belts or similar accessories that are designed to be very easy to get rid of in case of emergency.
This is not always true.
Your buoyancy decreases as you go deeper (and have more water above you, causing more downward pressure).
At a depth of 30 meters (100 feet), the pressure is 4 atmospheres, 4 times that of sea level.
Furthermore, not everyone is positively buoyant. The less fat one has, especially if not wearing diving suit, the more likely staying afloat/level to become harder.
As the depth increases, lungs and all bodily cavities shrink, further adding to one's density.
So, at 30 meters, it is actually quite a struggle to swim back up, even more so if you've lost your fins.
As for weights, I used to work out and exercise daily. During that time, I also dived few times a week spanning various sea conditions throughout the year and never have once taken weights as I was already negative.
Fast forward 2 years to today, I put on 15kg (33 lbs) and I need 10kg weight to enjoy my dive. But on the upside, I'd probably skyrocket to the surface if needed, lol :D
But also higher pressure pushing you upwards too! Buoyant force is equal to weight of displaced fluid, and so is independent of depth. (edit: given same fluid and temperature) (edit2: and well, buoyant force will be slightly stronger because fluid will be more compressed at the bottom)
Edit: Found a direct quote on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Properties_of_water#Compressib...: >The low compressibility of water means that even in the deep oceans at 4 km depth, where pressures are 40 MPa, there is only a 1.8% decrease in volume.[40]
Thank you for correcting this.
Near the surface it’s almost never an issue, but for ultra deep dives it’s important.
This statement is wrong on many levels. I'll try to correct just one part:
Your buoyancy must NOT decrease as you go deeper. That's one of the fundamental rules you need to follow if you want to dive more than once :) If you don't watch your depth and take necessary steps to maintain neutral buoyancy, you'd sink like a stone (or rise like a balloon). Nobody wants that.
What you mean is: you need more air in you buoyancy compensator (BC) to maintain neutral buoyancy (= keep your volume constant) as you go deeper.
If you don't take weights, you need to inflate your bc to lift you. In an emergency, you generally don't have time to swim up anyway.
All that said, I was just trying to point out that it was possible to "fall home" from underwater, assuming you are within the limits of your equipment.
A buoyancy compensator, filled with a fixed quantity (not volume) of air, does decrease in volume as you descend and the pressure increases. You'd sink faster and faster if you did not add air as required. Therefore, you must actively manage a BCD!
On the way up, the opposite happens. The quantity of air in your buoyancy compensator has an increasing volume of air as you rise and the pressure decreases, providing you with increasing buoyancy. Uncontrolled, this would rocket you towards the surface. Therefore, you must actively manage a BCD!
Lungs do not change in volume in SCUBA as they do when free (breath hold) diving, because your regulator is allowing you to constantly breathe air which is at the same pressure as the water around you.
When free diving, you carry weights to be neutrally buoyant at around 30 feet. Above the neutral buoyancy depth, you float towards the surface, and must swim down to descend. Below the neutral buoyancy depth, you become negatively buoyant, sink increasingly quickly, and must swim up to ascend. This is also important to be aware of; you don't want to strap weights to yourself that you can't drop: You may think you're capable of swimming up against your negative buoyancy, but if you only test at 10 feet under you may not be capable when you get deeper!
I did indeed neglect to explain what needs to happen. Thank you for clarifying. Let's all hope to enjoy many more dives :)
I'm not sure if it is just me, but I could not understand this at all. Do you mind rephrasing it? Which type of person has a harder time stating afloat?
Bone + Muscle have specific gravities > 1.0.
Generally, the more fat on a person, the greater that person's buoyancy.
The more fat one has, the less overall average density becomes, making it harder to sink. I have a close friend who is very overwheight and she can practically sit upright floating. I must admit I'd usually envy her when I struggled staying afloat while she enjoye a cool refreshment like it were her couch :)
So in short, less fat, more muscle mass, more bone mass harder to stay afloat.
Also the diving suite (which is made from a foam-like material) and some of the hallow diving gear make it harder to sink, hence the need for weights.
This is why saturation divers spend significant amounts of time in a pressure vessel after a period of diving to decompress.
This can't be the case here, they were inside their submarines the whole time.
ps: 100 feet = ~30m, 650 feet=~200m
No way man, didn't you watch Gravity [2013]? /s
If you come in at some super shallow angle you'd think you could do it, but at some point one ends up going from an orbit to a trajectory, at which point unless your air resistance can throttle your air speed below some value, you'll always over-heat?
I've thought maybe it's that things can come from below where as generally that doesn't happen on the ground. It could also be the reverb-y sounds. I have no idea. I love the ocean and swimming so ...
What terrifies me most is the stuff that lives down there [0].
[0] https://www.livescience.com/16231-creepy-deep-sea-creatures-...
It would work as follows, an astronaut would manually capture a satellite with the help of the Shuttle's arm, and then they would move it into the bay where they would refuel it with a hypergolic mixture that included hydrazine. At the time, the odds for a fatal interaction with the hydrazine were rated low, but in retrospect, this manoeuvre was extremely dangerous and incredibly unwise.
The details of the experiment involved them doing an EVA and then servicing the satellite and hooking it up with the fuel source, before retreating to the shuttle to let the hypergolics flow. It is needless to say that a mistake would have been costly. AFAICT, the project was never attempted again and was cancelled after the loss of Challenger.
https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/technology/sts-newsref/...
http://www.spacefacts.de/mission/english/sts-41g.htm
Her second mission was even more interesting. She helped deploy Hubble - she wrote about that experience and others in "Handprints on Hubble", https://www.amazon.com/Handprints-Hubble-Astronauts-Inventio...
It's well worth the read if you're interested in space.
The EYOS Expeditions blog post [2] is the press release from which the NPR piece is based.
The technical challenges are due to the pressure at depth and communication through water. The manned submersible seems to be a requirement until better autonomous vehicles are programmed. I keep thinking that these machines should be liquid filled, like the gamer PCs immersed in mineral oil for cooling, to avoid the pressure issues.
I’m not sure that we need men or women 11 km down except for media coverage. I’d rather see thousands of small/cheap fully autonomous sea floor landers taking benthic core samples worldwide than one giant expedition doing gimmicks to get media coverage.
[1] https://fivedeeps.com/home/technology/
[2] https://www.eyos-expeditions.com/kathy-sullivan-becomes-firs...
Well, but men and women want to be there.
This last paragraph of yours is a mirror image of the same argument against manned space exploration - wouldn't it be better/easier/cheaper if it was all done by autonomous robots? The answers are also similar: we don't have the necessary tech, we likely won't have it without intermediate missions involving humans, even in robotic missions there will be a benefit of having humans near the mission site (in case of space: light lag), and media coverage is actually a good thing, because both fields are starved for funding.
Indeed it is the exact same argument and it has been made more eloquently by much greater men than I. Freeman Dyson made the argument in a talk he gave at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics titled "Living Through Four Revolutions"[1]. He discusses the International Space Station (ISS) starting at about the 7:15 mark and he adds the following quip:
> [The Russians] are very proud of the space station and for good reasons. They believe that human activities in space are an end in itself, essentially as an international sporting event. They don't sell it under false pretences as a scientific program.
[1] https://perimeterinstitute.ca/videos/living-through-four-rev...
At the same time why we can't do both?
So she is both the first female spacewalker AND the first female Challenger Deep diver. That is really remarkable, talk about opening doors and being a role model.
Her achievement was the first women to walk in space.
Have there been people who have walked in space, climbed Mount Everest, eaten heaps of hot dogs that have dived to the deepest point in the ocean.
Maybe, but unless they have eaten the most hot dogs, or were the first to climb Mount Everest, it's not really a headline.
The bottom of the sea
Your eyes...
>All told, EYOS Expeditions said that just seven people had reached the point before Sullivan, all of whom were men.
So most likely none of the other seven was an astronaut. This makes Sullivan the first person to walk space and reach the deepest point of the ocean. The story is that one person was in space and at the deepest point, not that a woman was there, too.
With that perspective, what does she have to say? The article doesn't let her speak, besides a short quote that is shorter than the tweet of the piloting man. If that voyage is an achievement to be taken as guidance, why is there no interview? They can send a picture so they can exchange questions and answers.
> most people aren't going to know her by name. So you say the first woman to walk in space
She wasn't the first woman in space.
That was Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in 1963.
She wasn't the first woman to walk in space.
That was Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya in 1984.
She wasn't the first American woman in space.
That was Sally Ride in 1983.
She was the first American woman to do a spacewalk.
It gives hope to those who fear that those barriers are so large as to be insurmountable and without which many of those would choose not to try.
As for equal opportunity and recognition, I would say it's often skewed in favour of women right now. A woman can find a job in tech quite easily because, for some reason, companies want to hire women. That's not equality. Recognition is also higher for women. Women don't have to be first or best to get recognised, they just have to be the first or best woman. There's no such thing as "first man". It's often repeated that the first programmer was a woman. OK, so who was the first male programmer? Nobody knows or cares.
Based on the title it lead me to think that a man had done that before her and the achievement she accomplished here was being the first US woman to do both. Otherwise the article would had said said person and world record without qualifying the achievement by gender and nationality.
The article does not specify if any of the other 7 people who also reached the depth had been in space, so with the comments in here I am now more unsure what the achievement actually is.
> If it was "some astronaut," that would be weird
If it was the first astronaut to be in both places then its not weird at all. First astronaut that explore both extreme environments is an interesting achievement. I would read that story.
Bingo. This isn't about science. This is about inspiring young women.
Limiting Factor is correctly identified by NYT as the submersible used: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/science/challenger-deep-k...