MEN’S JOURNAL 92 MARCH 2012 The Challenger Deep could be the first manned craft to reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench. H79;JE J>;8EJJEC E<J>;I;7 Graham Hawkes has devoted most of the past three decades to designing, building — and finding someone to pay for — a submarine capable of cruising the deepest reaches of the ocean. Now, with Richard Branson’s money and his own refined technology, he’s about to reach his goal — if James Cameron, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and even his ex-wife don’t beat him to it. Xo ADAM HIGGINBOTHAM f^eje]hWf^iXo DAN WINTERS n a neon-lit garage overlooking the marina in Point the death of its most dedicated patron. It’s a quest that has shadowed Richmond, California, the stubby white form of Hawkes’ life to such an extent that he now struggles to remember how an experimental submarine with wings and a tail long it’s been since he started. “The holy grail of my profession? To — a child’s idea of a spacecraft — rests on a galva- get to the bottom of the ocean? To solve that problem? Let’s see,” he nized trailer. The blunt-nosed hull is 17 feet long says, calculating the time past. “Twenty-five years.” and just large enough to accommodate a single And yet, since the Virgin initiative was announced last April, others man. It encloses a glossy black cylinder of wound have come forward to outline their own plans to visit Challenger Deep, carbon fiber that ends in a thick glass dome engi- including one financed by the director James Cameron and another neered to withstand the eight tons per square inch involving one of Hawkes’ ex-wives. For all the decades of effort and of pressure it will face sometime this year on its millions of dollars the engineer has spent trying to reach his goal, it journey to Challenger Deep, the deepest point in remains possible that someone else might get there before him. the world’s oceans — a place not visited by man for more than half a century. Beneath the cockpit, umans have entered Challenger Deep only once. bright-red decals spell out the names of the men who plan to pilot the On January 23, 1960, two men — U.S. Navy Lieu- submarine and under their names in slightly smaller letters, a third tenant Don Walsh and Swiss scientist Jacques Icredit. designer: graham hawkes. Piccard — squeezed into a steel ball and descended “This,” Hawkes announces, “is Challenger.” A sharp-featured seven miles to the bottom under the weight of nine Englishman in his early sixties, Hawkes may have designed more H tons of iron shot. They stayed 20 minutes. Since submersibles than anyone else alive — everything from torpedoes to then, 12 men have walked on the moon, but no one has returned to revolutionary diving suits for oil exploration to an underwater “swim- the bottom of the sea. mer delivery vehicle” he’s currently working on for U.S. special forces Now four separate groups share similar plans to send human be- — but the vessel in front of him, known as DeepFlight Challenger, is ings seven miles down. In addition to the Virgin team, Cameron, who unlike any of the other submarines he’s worked on. “You’re looking used Hawkes’ submersibles to film his 3-D documentary Aliens of the at a craft that is twice as deep as anything else,” he says. Deep, has been working on his own project for more than five years, Hawkes had originally designed the submarine for Steve Fossett and Florida-based Triton submarines has also announced plans to — commodities trader and professional adventurer — who intended reach 36,000 feet. In California, Google chairman Eric Schmidt has to add a visit to Challenger Deep, at the southern end of the Mariana quietly funded the designs of two different machines capable of mak- Trench, to his collection of firsts and world records. Hawkes was weeks ing the journey — by a team at DOER Marine, the company founded away from completing the vessel when, in 2007, Fossett disappeared by oceanographer Sylvia Earle, who was married to Hawkes for six in a single-engine plane over the Sierra Nevada. Afterward, the sub- years. “For those who care about that, it’s a race,” Hawkes says. “I don’t marine languished in Hawkes’ workshop, awaiting the unlikely pos- know that Cameron cares about it. I suspect he does. I think Chris sibility that someone else with the money and nerve to use it would definitely does. I think Virgin definitely does. They’re racing.” be found. Then, last year, Sir Richard Branson committed to funding But so far, the Triton and DOER submarines exist only on the the completion of the submarine — under the brand Virgin Oceanic drawing board. And Chris Welsh, who will pilot DeepFlight Challenger — with Chris Welsh, a California real-estate entrepreneur and trans- and hopes to develop his own business using deep-water technology, Pacific yachtsman, as his co-investor and chief pilot. has been collaborating with Cameron’s team — the competitors share DeepFlight Challenger is only the latest version of a dream that specialized sonar equipment as well as buoyancy foam devised by has obsessed Graham Hawkes for most of his adult life, a project that Cameron himself. Given his head start, Welsh says he’s closer to reach- has endured through two marriages and several businesses, and sur- ing Challenger Deep than Cameron, but any setback in a project this vived despite a persistent lack of money, the disdain of scientists, and complex will cost so much time that the director could easily get there 601A84; 1 >DHB 0 5?64CCH 8 <0 6 In 2011, Richard Branson and Chris Welsh (left) announced plans to pilot DeepFlight Challenger to the deepest points in the ocean. 4B MEN’S JOURNAL 94 MARCH 2012 first. “According to the calendar today, we would be ahead of Jim,” Welsh tells me in late 2011. “But somewhere in the equation we could easily trip and lose six, nine months.” Deeper and Deeper Hawkes believes there is little danger anyone else will reach Chal- Reaching ever farther beneath the ocean’s surface has been lenger Deep before his submarine. “I don’t have to be smarter than Graham Hawkes’ main preoccupation and life’s work. anybody else. I’ve just plain worked harder and longer than anybody else. I’ve been thinking about this nonstop — and I’m 64. I think we’re way, way ahead,” he says. “Unless we’re idiots.” raham Hawkes, who is by turns taciturn and didac- tic, and who speaks in an accent so warped by de- cades of living in California that a BBC film crew recently asked him where he was from, did not come to submarine engineering out of a romantic attach- G ment to the deep. As a teenager growing up in a colorless London suburb, what he really wanted to do was design aircraft. “I was enamored by the romance of the early days of flight,” he says. “When one person in their backyard could build a plane out of string and canvas with two wings and go and fly faster than anybody else.” But without the grades to pursue an aerospace degree, Hawkes settled for engineering and, at 21, took a job making antitank warheads for the British army. It wasn’t until he began engineering torpedoes for the Royal Navy that he became interested in subs. “It looked to me like the aerospace industry was years and years ago,” Hawkes says, “when one person could make a big difference.” His new enthusiasm coincided with a boom in offshore oil and gas exploration in the early 1970s, and he quickly found a job engineering the Jim suit: a giant magnesium alloy diving suit with articulated joints and hydraulic claws designed for work on deep-sea drilling rigs. Hawkes was charged with improving Jim’s depth rating, but when his sugges- tions to radically overhaul it were rejected, he quit to build a suit of his own. Painted bright yellow, with bulbous arms that resembled 98<BD8C mandibles, the Wasp sold well at £500,000 a piece, and in the small 8]cWTTPa[h (&b^]T^U world of commercial diving, Hawkes was a success. 7PfZTb½Äabc_a^YTRcbfPbT]VX Yet from the beginning, he found that world to be a wild frontier ]TTaX]V_PacbU^acWT9X\bdXcP] Tg^bZT[Tc^]fXcWWhSaPd[XR[X\Qb where enormous financial stakes and a buccaneering spirit often trumped STbXV]TSc^\P]X_d[PcTcWT business ethics. Before the Wasp even went into production, Hawkes’ eP[eTb^]STT_bTP^X[aXVb competitors seized a prototype and locked it in a warehouse, where they F0B? tried, unsuccessfully, to copy the design. It took two years of legal action 5^acWTFPb_½beXTfX]VS^\T to get it back. “I nearly had a nervous breakdown,” Hawkes says. 7PfZTbdbTSP?haTgbP[PSQ^f[ < 0 Early on, Hawkes learned to cope with designing around a lack of _daRWPbTSUa^\P[^RP[\PaZTcP A 6 STRXbX^]cWPc]TPa[hR^bcWX\WXb A> cash. Unable to afford the glass viewing dome designed for the proto- ? 7 [XUTSdaX]VcTbcX]Vº8fPbYdbcP 2 A type Wasp, he improvised by using a Pyrex salad bowl he found in a 0 ZXS»WTbPhbºH^dS^cWPcbcdUU local market. In a Royal Navy testing facility, Hawkes took the Wasp fWT]h^d½aTh^d]V» A4B4 0 — and its supermarket dome — into a pressure chamber where sea water 84B 6 344?A>E4A 34AB4 was pumped in to reproduce conditions 2,000 feet beneath the surface.