Victor Vescovo and Richard Garriott — the D&D connection

Under the sea, you and me… Here they are at the bottom of the ocean. And in the strangest of coincidences, I first them independently in Texas when I was 13, with a shared passion for D&D. I only knew astronaut Richard Garriott by his gamer nom Lord British when we met at a NASA JSC space camp. And Victor Vescovo was a classmate of mine at St. Mark’s in Dallas (a small school).

And then what do these jokers do on my birthday? They hooked up and went to the lowest place on Earth, Challenger Deep.

Richard spoke about the sub Limiting Factor with CollectSpace: “They have had to overcome some amazing engineering problems, starting with just how to keep the passengers alive.

The 9-centimeter-thick titanium hull is the smallest vehicle I’ve ever been in, although it felt roomier than a Soyuz spacecraft because there is less people and material on the inside. So you actually feel very comfortable, but the interior diameter only starts at about 1.46 meters and shrinks to about 1.4 meters as the pressure builds on the outside.

Water is non-compressible but in fact it does compress at least a little. The density of the water becomes greater and greater at these enormous depths. Our descent rate at the beginning was a couple of meters per second, but by the time we got to the bottom, the water itself became so dense that we slowed down to under a half a meter per second, just because we were almost becoming neutrally buoyant at the bottom, despite the fact that we were getting smaller by being crushed.”