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DeepFlight Challenger is a one-person submersible built with the intention of reaching the Challenger Deep, utilizing DeepFlight technology from Hawkes Ocean Technologies. The submersible is owned by Virgin Oceanic.
The submersible was designed by Graham Hawkes and Hawkes Ocean Technologies (HOT). It was originally ordered by Steve Fossett for an attempt on the Challenger Deep, to become the first solo dive there. [1] [2] Planning for the submersible started in 2000. [3] It was put on the order sheet in 2005, with a depth capability of 11,000 metres (37,000 ft). [3] [4] The craft was named Challenger by Fossett after the Challenger Deep. [4] At the time of the order, this would have doubled the depth that a single-place sub would be capable of going. [4] It was to have been a "secret project" of Fossett's to be the first to solo the Challenger Deep, and was secret at the time of his death in 2007. [3] [5] The project was put on hold when Fossett died, and locked up in a warehouse at Hawkes Ocean Technologies, by the then owners, Fossett's estate, [2] but was later revived when Chris Welsh of Deep Sub LLC bought the unfinished sub and restarted the program in 2010. Welsh had purchased the sub and the yacht Cheyenne from the Fossett estate for around $1 million. Virgin Oceanic came in as sponsors a year later in 2011. [6] [7] [8] At the time of Fossett's death, the sub had been almost finished, [2] [9] only four weeks from dive tests [10] and delivery. [11] This sub is the first deep-diving sub to be constructed with a pressure hull (central tube portion) of carbon fibre composite, built by Spencer Composites for HOT. Its carbon fiber design would later influence the tube for the sub Titan, [12] which imploded. Simulations showed that the most likely cause of the implosion was failure of the carbon fiber hull. [13]
The submersible uses composite technology to create a lightweight sub with great depth capabilities. The view dome is made from quartz, while the rest of the pressure hull uses carbon/epoxy composites. The interface between dome and hull is by bonded titanium rings. The sub has a 24-hour endurance, 3 knots (5.6 km/h) bottom speed, and 110 m/min (350 ft/min) dive rate. [1] [10] [14] The sub uses syntactic foam for buoyancy, and is positively buoyant when no ballast is attached. The submersible does not have a temperature control system for the cabin, so interior temperature eventually falls to water temperature. [3] [15] The sub weighs 3,600 kilograms (8,000 lb), and does not need a dedicated mothership. [2] [4] It has a 15-nautical-mile (28 km) range, 6 knots (11 km/h) maximum speed, and 3-axis freedom of motion. It uses LED lighting instead of arc lights, and has laser "feeler" beams to aid navigation. [4] The sub can dive to the bottom of the ocean and get back to the surface in 5 hours. [16] The design drew from DeepFlight II, another Hawkes Ocean Technologies full depth submersible. [17] The pressure hull is rated to withstand 140 MPa (20,000 psi) (more than the 110 MPa (16,000 psi) at the bottom of the Mariana Trench). [2] The sub is smaller than James Cameron's Deepsea Challenger. [18] Challenger represents the third generation of DeepFlight technology, one generation behind the DeepFlight Super Falcon. [19]
Richard Branson and Chris Welsh of Virgin Oceanic planned on using DeepFlight Challenger to reach the deepest point of each of the world's five oceans, the Mariana Trench of the Pacific Ocean (11,034 m or 36,201 ft), the Puerto Rico Trench of the Atlantic Ocean (8,605 m or 28,232 ft), the Diamantina Trench of the Indian Ocean (8,047 m or 26,401 ft), South Sandwich Trench of the Southern Ocean (7,235 m or 23,737 ft), and Molloy Deep of the Arctic Ocean (5,608 m or 18,399 ft). [10] [21] [22] The Cheyenne yacht was to have been used as the mothership for the dive efforts. [23]
It was planned that Branson would pilot the sub to the Puerto Rico Trench, while Chris Welsh would pilot it for the Mariana Trench dive. [21] Virgin Oceanic had hoped to be the first team to solo to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and first team to return to the Challenger Deep since the Bathyscaphe Trieste, the first submersible to dive to the Challenger Deep. However, James Cameron's Deepsea Challenge project beat them to it in March 2012. [18] There has been an undeclared race on to return to the Challenger Deep between four teams, Cameron's, Virgin Oceanic's, Google-Schmidt/DOER's, and Triton submersibles'. [24] The attempt on Challenger Deep had been announced in April 2011. [19]
Based on testing at high pressure, the DeepFlight Challenger was determined to be suitable only for a single dive, not the repeated uses that had been planned as part of Virgin Oceanic service. As such, in 2014, Virgin Oceanic scrapped plans for the five dives project using the DeepFlight Challenger, as originally conceived, putting plans on hold until more suitable technologies are developed. [25]
As of February 2012, several other vehicles are under development to reach the same depths. The groups developing them include: [26]
The Challenger Deep is the deepest known point of the seabed of Earth, located in the western Pacific Ocean at the southern end of the Mariana Trench, in the ocean territory of the Federated States of Micronesia.
The Mariana Trench is an oceanic trench located in the western Pacific Ocean, about 200 kilometres (124 mi) east of the Mariana Islands; it is the deepest oceanic trench on Earth. It is crescent-shaped and measures about 2,550 km (1,580 mi) in length and 69 km (43 mi) in width. The maximum known depth is 10,984 ± 25 metres at the southern end of a small slot-shaped valley in its floor known as the Challenger Deep. The deepest point of the trench is more than 2 km (1.2 mi) farther from sea level than the peak of Mount Everest.
A bathyscaphe is a free-diving, self-propelled deep-sea submersible, consisting of a crew cabin similar to a Bathysphere, but suspended below a float rather than from a surface cable, as in the classic Bathysphere design.
A submersible is an underwater vehicle which needs to be transported and supported by a larger watercraft or platform. This distinguishes submersibles from submarines, which are self-supporting and capable of prolonged independent operation at sea.
A deep-submergence vehicle (DSV) is a deep-diving crewed submersible that is self-propelled. Several navies operate vehicles that can be accurately described as DSVs. DSVs are commonly divided into two types: research DSVs, which are used for exploration and surveying, and DSRVs, which are intended to be used for rescuing the crew of a sunken navy submarine, clandestine (espionage) missions, or both. DSRVs are equipped with docking chambers to allow personnel ingress and egress via a manhole.
Kaikō was a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) built by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) for exploration of the deep sea. Kaikō was the second of only five vessels ever to reach the bottom of the Challenger Deep, as of 2019. Between 1995 and 2003, this 10.6 ton unmanned submersible conducted more than 250 dives, collecting 350 biological species, some of which could prove to be useful in medical and industrial applications. On 29 May 2003, Kaikō was lost at sea off the coast of Shikoku Island during Typhoon Chan-Hom, when a secondary cable connecting it to its launcher at the ocean surface broke.
The hadal zone, also known as the hadopelagic zone, is the deepest region of the ocean, lying within oceanic trenches. The hadal zone ranges from around 6 to 11 km below sea level, and exists in long, narrow, topographic V-shaped depressions.
A personal submarine is a submarine, usually privately funded and constructed, which is usually primarily intended for recreational use.
Deep-sea exploration is the investigation of physical, chemical, and biological conditions on the ocean waters and sea bed beyond the continental shelf, for scientific or commercial purposes. Deep-sea exploration is an aspect of underwater exploration and is considered a relatively recent human activity compared to the other areas of geophysical research, as the deeper depths of the sea have been investigated only during comparatively recent years. The ocean depths still remain a largely unexplored part of the Earth, and form a relatively undiscovered domain.
The Sirena Deep, originally named the HMRG Deep, was discovered in 1997 by a team of scientists from Hawaii. Its directly measured depth of 10,714 m (35,151 ft) is third only to the Challenger Deep and Horizon Deep, currently the deepest known directly measured places in the ocean. It lies along the Mariana Trench, 200 kilometers to the east of the Challenger Deep and 145 km south of Guam.
Virgin Oceanic is an undersea leisure venture of Newport Beach, CA businessman Chris Welsh and Sir Richard Branson, part of Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group. The brand was first reported in a 2009 Time Magazine interview. The flagship service provided by Virgin Oceanic was intended to take visitors to the deepest parts of the ocean; however, as of late 2014, the project has been put on hold until more suitable technologies are developed.
DeepFlight Merlin is a personal submarine by Hawkes Ocean Technologies, part of the DeepFlight line of submersibles. The positively buoyant submersible was designed by Graham Hawkes. The Merlin was the first winged open-cockpit submarine available on the market, and first three-man submarine in the "aero submarine" class, representing a major advance in scuba diving technology.
Hawkes Ocean Technologies is a marine engineering firm that specializes in consumer submarines, founded by Graham Hawkes. It is headquartered in San Francisco, US.
Graham Hawkes is a London-born marine engineer and submarine designer. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Hawkes designed 70% of the crewed submersibles produced in those two decades. As late as 2007, he held the world solo dive record of 910 metres (2,990 ft) in the submarine Deep Rover.
Jiaolong is a Chinese crewed deep-sea research submersible that can dive to a depth of over 7,000 metres (23,000 ft), developed from the Sea Pole-class bathyscaphe. It has the second-greatest depth range of any crewed research vehicle of the Chinese Navy; the only crewed expeditions to have gone deeper were the dives of the Trieste bathyscaphe in 1960, Archimède in 1962, Deepsea Challenger in 2012, and DSV Limiting Factor in 2019.
Deepsea Challenger is a 7.3-metre (24 ft) deep-diving submersible designed to reach the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest-known point on Earth. On 26 March 2012, Canadian film director James Cameron piloted the craft to accomplish this goal in the second crewed dive reaching the Challenger Deep. Built in Sydney, Australia, by the research and design company Acheron Project Pty Ltd, Deepsea Challenger includes scientific sampling equipment and high-definition 3-D cameras; it reached the ocean's deepest point after two hours and 36 minutes of descent from the surface.
DOER Marine is a marine technology company established in 1992 by oceanographer Sylvia Earle, based in Alameda, California.
Victor Lance Vescovo is an American private equity investor, retired naval officer, sub-orbital spaceflight participant, and undersea explorer. He was a co-founder and managing partner of private equity company Insight Equity Holdings from 2000-2023. Vescovo achieved the Explorers Grand Slam by reaching the North and South Poles and climbing the Seven Summits. He visited the deepest points of all of Earth's five oceans during the Five Deeps Expedition of 2018–2019.
Triton Submarines is an American company that designs and manufactures submersibles for research, filming, deep-ocean exploration, and the superyacht and high-end tourism sectors.