What is the Deep Flight Challenger?

thank you. We actually have a first for tech Stuff to introduce. This is our very first audio request. We had a fan send this in, so let's play the audio request from Nate. Hey guys, this is Nate calling in from London. I just thought you'd like to know that one night a couple of weeks ago, I spent two hours less sleeping because I was too busy reading

about submarines. Um. It was the day that Richard Branson announced Virgin Oceanic, which is the mission to send a special one man submarine to the deepest parts of Earth's oceans and see what's down there and have a play. I guess, but the submarine just fascinated me. It's an amazing piece of tech from what I've read, and really the idea of sending a person to those depths hasn't been done for decades and certainly hasn't been done with any kind of modern technology involved. And I thought that

would make a pretty awesome topic for a show. So here's hoping you might do that one day. Love the show, speech to you later. All right, guys, that was Nate. Actually we have to tell everyone who that who Nate is. Typically we we don't use last names with celebrity, not just an audio request, but a celebrity audio request. This guy is phenomenal? Is Nate links? Yes, he has a he has a tech journalist hero Yeah. Formerly I've seen at current editor of Wired dot co dot uk. Uh,

snazzy dresser, perfectly quafft fan of death metal. Nate is a man of many facets. I'm not even joking. You should follow his Twitter feed sometime you'll find listings of bands that I never knew existed. I'm a punk rocker. He's a thrasher, right, super cool guy, Nate, Thank you so much for sending that in. And this is our three first episode, so it's a new era. With tech stuff,

we thought we would tackle this topic. So we're talking about deep sea exploration, and we're going to talk about the deep Flight Challenger particularly, but before we do, let's talk about kind of the history of deep sea exploration. Alright, yeah, I mean it's it's not been h This is certainly not a technology that's been around for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Oh wait, you mean it has been

around for a few hundred years. Basic, Well, if we talk about the very basic technology, yeah, it's been around for a few centuries. But even then we're talking about some pretty limited explorations. So back in the day, which was a Thursday, it's just weird, right, But back in that Thursday, Um, back in the ancient times, essentially people thought, all right, oceans have life in them. That's clear. We could see the life. We we fish, we get fish.

But in general people thought, well, the deeper you go, the less life you were bound to encounter, until you reached a point where there's just no life. Right. You get to a certain depth and nothing is living down there, and by the time you hit the ocean floor, it's just essentially a desert, a lifeless desert. That was the

thinking until probably about the seventeenth century UM. But the one of the earliest forms of technology to test to kind of figure out how deep the ocean was came out of the days of the vikings, and that was a sounding weight. Sounding weight, yeah, which is pretty much

what sounds like. It was a weight tied to a line and you would lower the line over the side of a boat until you hit the bottom and then you would draw the weight back up to the surface and you would measure how long the line was and that would tell you how deep the ocean was. And back in the earliest days, the way that you would measure this is a sailor would hold the line out between his arms, so he stretches arms out and one

length of that would be a fathom. That's hard for me to fathom, and you know why because it seems like that would be different for every sailor. Yeah, the averages around uh six, it's like a six ft length total. That was the That was essentially what a fathom was, so not truly a standardized measure, right because it was based upon whoever happened to be holding the line, and if you had Stubby McGhee doing it, well, then you're gonna have a lot more fathoms than if stretch over.

There was measuring out the line, but so not in exact signs, but it was getting there right, It was it was at least an attempt to measure how deep the ocean and was. And of course we've heard the term fathom before and things like or that's leagues. What am I doing? I don't even know what I'm talking about. Christ you gotta stop me before I do that. Actually, when I think of fathom, I think it's really really uh the game for the gonna say really really bad.

But no, actually a lot of people like it. It was just very simple in which you're a dolphin. Anyway, Well, I was thinking of the thing that was messing me up. Was I think of a different Disney film than twenty thousand Leagues under the Sea about the fathoms below. Yeah. See, that's the problem is that I'm thinking about I've got a vacation planned where I'm going on a Disney vacation, and Disney has taken over my entire world right now, Well,

are you going under the ocean? Though, No, I'm not gonna go under the ocean, but we're gonna talk about going under the ocean. So you know, let's skip ahead from the Viking days to that seventeenth century I was talking about before that was the debatably that was around the time of the first submarine. Um and I say debatedly because it all depends upon whom you ask about when the first submarine was created and how viable it was.

But there was a Dutch inventor, Cornelius van Drebble. Okay, he created one that was a wooden frame sheathed in leather. It had oars sticking out the side. It had very close fitting leather flaps ceiling the holes that the oars went through, and was designed to go underwater. And he tested it in the Thames. Supposedly, King James the First

himself did a test ride on it. I can't imagine. Yeah, that's gonna be like this very well, maybe an apocryphal story, because you think would the King of England and Scotland put himself at such risk as to be in an underwater a submersible vehicle in the first of all the Thames. Have you seen the Thames? Oh? I have a few times. It's a lovely place. Anyway, you wouldn't want to be underwater there. So you know, I know, if if the king did go in the submarine, I know why he

would want to Is that so he could see whales? Uh? Nice? Nice? You know what we should also point out, of course, if you didn't hear from Nate's accent, he is of course British, so he's getting all these Anglo file jokes that were going. So but no, I'm sure a lot of people know of the UH Revolutionary War story here in the United States, and this is not going to make the UH people from the UK very happy. Maybe I don't know. I guess that's all water under the bridge,

but I would be rid of us now. Yeah. Really, so a lot of people probably remember that there was a very rudimentary submarine used in the Revolutionary War between England and the and what would be later the United States the English colonies. Um, and uh, you know, I'm going from memory, but I'm pretty sure it was. You know, it's very simple and I think it only used a spear. Yeah,

essentially it was designed to ram into enemy shops. Yes, it did not do very well, but it does get a page in the history well, a paragraph in the history books for you also hear about about attempts during the Civil War as well, and right around that same time, so you know, we're talking about wartime applications of submersible vehicles made to disrupt either trade or or wartime ship movements.

But at the same time, or roughly around the same time, just a few years after the Civil War, you had a ship that was specifically trying to to plumb the depths of the ocean and learn more about what is going on deep in the ocean floor. That's around eighteen seventy two to eighteen seventy six. Do you know what ship I'm talking about? No, I don't, Jonathan, Why don't you tell me? So we're going to talk about the Deep Flight Challenger. Well, the Deep Flight Challenger is named

after two things. It's named after the Challenger Deep Trench, which is a very deep trench in the ocean off in the Pacific Ocean. And it's named after the h M. S. Challenger, her Majesty's ship during the reign of Queen Victoria who sat on the Thorn for sixty years throne. Sorry, now it's an englished English Have you ever read the book? Now? Queen Victoria sat on a thorn for sixty years. She uh so so her Majesty's ship, the Challenger. Now, the

Challenger started off as a warship. It was a corvette class ship, and it was a It was used in in various UH conflicts UH in various parts of the world, but eventually was converted into a laboratory. It was a floating laboratory. It's English, so I can say it like that.

I'm not saying. And anyway, they were They covered around a hundred and twenty seven thousand kilometers, so around sixty eight thousand, almost sixty nine thousand nautical miles and was we we think of the HMS Challenger as being the first real serious study of deep sea exploration. And they took samples for on the sea floor, and they did essentially the same way. They would lower a weight down into the ocean until it hit and it would actually scoop up some of the betting on the sea floor.

When they brought it back up, they collected specimens of deep sea life that no one had ever seen before at that point. UM. It was the first real serious study of that of that UH environment, and since then various scientists and explorers and adventurers have been interested in really diving down and finding out more about that environment. Uh. And I was going to talk a little bit about a couple of other predecessors to the deep flight challenge.

For example, the bathosphere. I remember the bath sphere. I can't say the bathosphere, but I remember it. Yeah. It was developed in the in the thirties by William Beebe and Otis Barton, and they were both from the New York Zoological Society. And it was it was four and a half thousand pound hollow steel ball. Well it's about five ft in diameter, and the idea was that you would carry this on a ship. You would use a crane to move it over the ocean and then lower

it into the ocean. It was not uh, it was not powered in any way for for mobility. You would actually lower it on a cable. Electricity would create the necessary power for the oxygen system within the bathosphere. But in order to circulate the air, whoever was in the bathosphere actually used a handheld palm front fan to circulate

the air. They used chemicals to absorb carbon dioxide and moisture so that that way it wouldn't that you know, you wouldn't just have a coating of water all over everything inside the bathosphere, and it wouldn't the air wouldn't get stale, because you do have to find a way to scrub the carbon dioxide out of a submersible. That's

one of the challenges. Yeah, I remember the you know, things like diving bells and the diving suits that you always see it the in the older movies where they have the helmet and the hose and somebody's up on the ship cranking the hand crank piston driven air pump, so they were pumping bellows down into Yeah, yeah, yeah, very similar. And yeah, so you have to you still have to deal with that because you've got to have

a source of air. The first thing dropped down to around three thousand feet down into the ocean, which was pretty deep for the time being. And uh, and it was they saw a lot of animals that had never been observed before. They essentially wrote down everything they saw. But again, they couldn't move around. It was just dropping

down and then cranked back up and that's it. Uh. Later on I read that there was there were some sub scientists in the sixties who actually used essentially the bathosphere to descend into the Mariana Trench, which is the deepest point in the ocean. They didn't go all the way down, but they went I think around thirty five thousand feet down, which is lower than anyone else has ever been before. Uh, at least until we see if the Deep Light Challenger project as a success. Um. There

were some other early attempts. There was the the Bathist Gaffe, which was designed by a Belgian scientist, m August Picard, possibly an ancestor of John Luke. And uh, this one was attached to a tank, a free floating tank as opposed to attached to a vessel, but same the same sort of thing. It was lowered down into the ocean and um, yeah, it had a little bit more freedom

of movement than the bathmosphere. You had the Alvin you may have heard of the Alvin that was that was an early submersible as well that was used for exploration, the the Johnson Sea Link. Uh. These are pretty funky looking things that there. If you've ever seen The Abyss, the film The Abyss, you know they're in those kind of spherical saw it in the theater. Yeah, yeah, so those things, that's that's kind of based on that that

design there's uh. They're also sometimes called deep rover submersibles the UM there that are operated by the Deep Ocean Expeditions Company, So the deep rovers. They also look like the ones that were used in The Abyss, and James Cameron has used those for other projects, UM not not the Abyss specifically, although again the vehicles in that movie were based off of this UM. He used it an Aliens of the Deep his his Uh, you know that

that Nature film of deep sea creatures being under the ocean. Yes, he does. Apparently he's a big fan of that UM and he's a customer of, or at least a potential customer of, the same company that makes the Challenger UM. So I guess we can now sort of talk about

what the Challenger is. Yes, you had an other thing to add, well, I mean, I think our listeners probably will recognize that we're leaving out a pretty big step in between, which is, you know, the development from going from like a device like the bathosphere where you really don't have a whole lot of control to modern you know, well older and mid modern submarines development between and century, and we really don't We probably should do a separate

podcast on that. But I mean, you know, we're we're talking about machines that you know, can store air and have powered to stay underwater for long periods of time, some of which you know, can hold many many people. Yeah, we should probably talk about the difference between a submarine and a submersible. I think that would be Yeah. So a submarine is essentially it's a boat that goes underwater,

is really what you're talking about. And it's and it's a sustain it's a self sustaining kind of thing in the sense that it doesn't depend upon a larger vehicle to get around, uh more than a few kilometers, right, Like most submarines can go incredible distances, especially the nuclear submarines because you have that nuclear power going. Um. But yeah, these these submarines are capable of traveling vast distances either submerged or you know, they can you know, various forms

of travel. They could go either under the water, over the water, not not on top of but you know, anyway, the point being that they don't depend on a larger boat to uh to travel around, right, They're not dropped off, right, and some of them can stay underwater for weeks at a time. Um, some of them use a caterpillar drive. Yeah. Yeah,

that'd be the Red October. Yeah. So what we're talking about is sort of a step in between when I when I and again in my head I'm thinking when I think submarines, I'm thinking, you know, like the warships, um, you know, large large submarines. This, this submarine, the weird that that Nate specifically wants to ask about or did ask us about, um, is a much much smaller machine. In fact, it only holds one person. And this is where we get into sort of the submersible realm submersibles

are are. It's kind of like the turns between a boat and a ship, right, YEA. Arguably you could say a ship is any vessel that's large enough to hold a boat, and a boat is any vessel small enough to fit on a ship. Square is the rectangle, but not every rectangle is quare. So submersible tends to be part of a you know, it depends on a mother ship, you know, or some other vehicle where it is deployed from that mother ship and then can go and explore.

But it can't travel vast different distances on its own. It's not meant for that and uh. And that's the case with the Challenger. It's also the case of other big famous submersibles like the Mirror one and the Mere two. These were developed by at one time the Soviet Union. It's built by a company in Finland, and then when they were finally produced, actually they were purchased by the same exploration company that uses the deep rovers same the same one uses the Mirror one and mir two for

x opration. Uh So, like I said, it's not the only submersible out there. There's a one built in Japan that was called the Shinkai. That one currently holds the record for the deepest submersible exploration, and that one went down to six thousand Thus in the name, so they name it after they dove. Yeah. Yeah, if they had gone just a little further than the one. Uh but yeah, that's those are famous. We can't not mention them because they are out there. But it's child's play compared to

what the Challenger is supposed to do. You know, when I think of a submersible too, I'm I'm thinking of something that can't go very deep, just because you know, it's a smaller ship. It's it's sort of limited in its capacity, but this is a very unique, uh unique vessel. So the ship was actually commissioned by somebody who is a famous adventurer on his own, who sadly is no longer with us, in an attempt to uh set a world record, I believe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're talking about Fawcett,

Steve Fawcett. Steve Fawcett, billionaire adventurer he uh he had back in two thousand five, was thinking about investing in this, this potential vehicle that would be able to break all records of deep sea exploration, manned deep sea exploration and in fact unmanned as well. No unmanned vehicle would go

as deep as what he was looking for. He wanted to have something that could go along the bottom of the Mariana Trench and and take a look firsthand at this alien world that no one else has ever seen in person, and most of us have only seen, you know, bits and pieces of it through unmanned vehicle footage. There were there was one bathosphere uh journey that did go down that low, so technically a couple of people saw at one level, but they were not able to go

all the way down like like Fawcett wanted to. And so Fawcett talked to a guy, um uh Graham Hawks. Graham Hawks is a UH kind of an engineer inventor UH marines specialist. Talked to Graham Hawks about the possibility of creating this this vehicle, and Um Graham Hawks is the head of Hawks Ocean Technologies, and he started to work on the deep Flight submersibles and specifically the Deep

Flight Challenger. The sad store part of this story is that Fawcett died in two thousand seven in an airplane crash. And he died apparently just a couple of weeks before they had planned to announce the Deep Flight Challenger and the purpose for this vehicle to explore the Mariana Trench. With his death, the whole project took a massive setback.

I mean, it was clearly a terrible tragedy. And also it just it meant that the driving force was behind this development was suddenly gone all right, And and Fawcett was a champion of adventure and exploration and pushing human achievement to the limits in every venue, and so to lose that that evangelist was a big blow. Well in two thousand and ten, a fellow named Chris Welsh pilot here who had uh was really interested in this project

kind of took up the torch. So in twos ten, three years after Faston's death, Chris Welch picks up the the the the the torch and runs with it. He starts to push for the project to start again and gets the interest of Virgin Oceanic, which is a brand new company formed by another incredibly wealthy adventurer thrill seeker, who also happened to be a friend of Steve Fawcett. Yeah,

and this was who Nate mentioned, Richard Branson. So Branson now has picked up where his friend left off and says, all right, we want to use the Deep Flight Challenger to go on a series of five dives. And why five Because he wants to visit the five deepest points of each of the well, the the deepest point of each of the five oceans, so that means the Mariana Trench in the Pacific. And then he wants to go to all the other deep points and all the other

oceans and uh and do an exploration run. And so the Deep Flight Challenger is his um, his vehicle of choice. So let's talk a little bit about this vehicle and what makes it so special yet is fascinating. I have to admit, um, it's about seventeen ft eight inches long, twelve ft eleven inches wide and five ft seven inches high. Um weighs about eight thousand pounds, and it's it's actually made of carbon fiber and titanium. Uh, and you know

probably some other stuff. Well, if you duct tape maybe according to Ram Hawks, if you had made it just from titanium, it wouldn't survive the pressures at three six feet because you're talking about massive amounts of pressure up to around say, oh, I don't know, twenty thousand pounds per square inch. That's intense pressure. So you have to be able to create a structure that's going to withstand that.

And the carbon fibers are extremely resilient. According to Graham Hawks in one interview I read I think it was with Popular Mechanics. He talked about how a computer laid that down fiber by fiber to build this this structure and uh, and it's meant to withstand that intense pressure. The the vehicle can hold up to twenty four hours of oxygen, so you could go down for a full day and night underwater, and you can go from the very bottom of the ocean to the surface in right

around five hours. And it will can travel up to a forty five degree angle when it's going up or down, so you should be able to make about per minute, yeah at that angle right right, And that's pretty interesting. And then one of the one of the key features of this vehicle is that it has wings. It's not like if you look at a lot of submersibles, they tend to look like tubes right with with a propeller at one end or some other form of thruster at one end, and then there might be a rudder there

that helps you guide which direction. But essentially the way that it works is that it uh it has some uh as variable buoyancy where it will allow some water in and then once it gets to wherever it's going, you know, it's bottom depth, in order to go back up, it has to drop some weights and then it will come back up. So, I mean, it's not it's not

terribly sophisticated. You've got something that provides some thrust and then you control the vector of the thrust through either a couple of different ways, Like you can have sutiple propellers and then you just you know, power on the ones that will allow you to turn in the direction you want to go, or you have a rudder, but there's not a whole lot of control there. Hawks idea was to add wings to his submersible and make it more like a plane. So it quote unquote flies underwater

with one major major difference from an airplane swings. Oh they're upside down, lack right, So I guess we need to describe what lift is here. Yeah. Well, and in the case of an airplane wing, if you were to look at it from a cross cut, Yeah, a cross cut of the wing, you would notice that, um, the bottom of the wing is essentially a flat it's it doesn't have any curve um. But the top of the

wing is more convex. Uh. It it's sort of a it's sort of like a half tear drop in the way, because the top of it bulges out towards the leading edge of the wing and then tapers off towards the back edge. And what happens in an airplane is the air moving. As the air moves over the wing on the bottom, it moves roughly straight across and on the top. Because it has to go around that bulge, it has

further to go in the same amount of time. So if you if you have the same amount of time to go a further distance, that means you're going faster than someone who's you know, like if you're running a straight line from A to B and I'm running a circuitous line from A to B, and we both have to leave A and arrive at B at the same time, I have to run faster than you to get there. Yes, so same sort of thing. The air going over the top is going to be moving faster than the air

going underneath. This also creates a difference in air pressure. It's what creates lift. We're oversimplifying, so please don't write in and talk to me about how I'm wrong about this. I've read X K C D, I understand. But the that's the basic principle. So with the the UH the challenger, what they've done is the curve part is not at the tops on the bottom, and the reason for that is they don't want lift. They want to counteract buoyancy. So it's basically instead of of you know, the air

pressure difference sucking the plane up. It's pushing it's pushing submersible down. Yes, except it's and it's water pressure, not your pressure, right exactly, So it's someone, yeah, exactly, it's it's hydrodynamic, not aerodynamic indeed, And so all you have to do, this is all you have to do. I'm really oversimplifying. You provide thrust. If you provide thrust and you're moving forward, then the wings do the work of working against the buoyancy and allow you to maintain or

dive deeper, dive deeper. And then the idea being that if you just stop, then your buoyancy is going to start pulling you up. You don't even have to you know, you don't have to have as much of power thing to go back up. You still might will probably have to drop weights in order to surface, but that's what allows it to to travel at these depths, and it

kind of apparently controls like uh an aircraft. Um well, it makes sense that in this case, because of its design um, the ship would have to continue, it would have to stay mobile, it would have to keep moving in order to essentially stay to what we used to say about sharks. Yes, and of course that's not always true. Not all sharks have to move all the time where they drown, but you know, same basic principle, but they do swim constantly, so they it's I think this is

a super cool idea. I also think it's interesting that there's a patent on this device, by the way, and if you want to look it up, you can, I mean, you can do a free patent search Google patent searches free and uh it's patent number seven million, one thirty one thousand, three hundred eighty nine B one. Okay, And that number again is seven million, one thirty one thousand, three hundred eighty nine B one. And that is the that that will show you the pattern that talks about

this submersible. Now, now the pattern is actually for a series of submersibles, not just the Challenger, because deep deep flight has UH not. They don't just make the Challenger. In fact, they make all these crazy submersibles for really wealthy private adventurer types like like Branson and fawcett Um. So it's not just the Challenger, but a lot of the basic UH technologies are explained in that pattern, including they had to design a very comfortable chair because if

you're gonna be uh going underwater for that long. You want to have a comfortable seat. And you know, this is designed for the non pilot, the non you know, it's it's essentially a civilian adventurer. It's not meant for uh military use or anything like that, So it has to be comfortable because most of us don't put up with that kind of stuff, right, But it is designed for what While it isn't a military uh, it is however, designed to do some scientific work. And it's not just

about adventuring. Although they've partnered with some pretty cool people like Scripts Ocean Institute, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a lot of other scientific organizations, and uh, the hope is that the Challenger will be able to get a real good look at this underwater world that we we hardly know

anything about, and and provide some information for scientific purposes. Uh. And you know, I'm really excited to see exactly how much comes out of this, this uh, this project, and and you know, they'll be interesting to see how challenging the Challenger really finds going down to that depth. It's a little it would be a little frightening for me, I think to try to go down to that that depth because um that intense pressure, I mean, the smallest

weakness and that thing is crumples. Yeah, right exactly. And you know, the controls here are mechanical controls, like you know, you move the the stick to the left and it it mechanically moves the wings so that you roll. It's almost like flying a plane. You there's pitch and roll as opposed to you know, you're not just heading down or heading up or or you know, doing a vector turn,

vector based turn like you would with a regular submersible. Uh. It's it's a fascinating approach and I'm really hoping that it's a successful one will hopefully be able to find out before too much longer. Again, this project was originally supposed to launch both figuratively and literally in two thousand seven, right, and they're anticipating the possibility of going ahead with it inven so it may not be but a few months off. Yeah, And it's I'll be excited to see if it breaks

those records. Those records pretty much stay broken because if it can get to the bottom of the Maria on a trench, there ain't no deeper. Yeah, you know, well there will, so you go, well, there's a lot of information about it on Virgin Oceanic's website. UM, and it's you you can learn more about the people on the science crew, the people on the surface who are going

to be with them at the time. UM. It is interesting to note that while uh Sir Richard isn't going down to the Mariana Trench, he is going to be piloting uh one mission himself the second mission. And I'm just going I hear they're actually gonna alternate? Are they going to alternate? Here? That he's going to alternate? So he does every other one. There's there's five of them he'll do. So that means if he's doing even once, he does two and four. Yeah, and so yeah, I mean,

these guys are brave, crazy people. But you need like, if we didn't have these brave crazy people, think of all the the projects that never would have happened. Absolutely, the Space Race never would have happened. You know, all the test pilots who have gone before, all of the pilots who who are out there now, I mean without the test ailets who actually were willing to put their lives at risk to see if this stuff would work the way that everyone thought it was gonna work. They

wouldn't exist. We'd still be getting around on horse and buggy are dirigible? Oh that, by the way, that is interesting. That's the way Hawks describes the difference between um, the the Challenger based wing based submersible and the old submersibles is like he says, you know, one, the old based submersibles are essentially dirigibles. There's not a whole lot of control, and they're slow and sluggish and thing, you know, And

this is more elegant, like a like an airplane. So yeah, that patent, by the way, if you do read it, it's funny. It's it. It comes across to me as one of the snoodiest patents I've ever read, because it's like it's like they're little subtle digs at other submersibles all the way through, which I think is is hilarious. Um yeah, but so, Nate, thank you very much for listening to our show. We really appreciate it. Thank you for the audio request. That was awesome. I hope that

this was an interesting discussion. We're really looking forward to seeing more about this and the kind of technology that comes out of this, because you know that we don't just get bio biological information. From these sort of procedures, we find out new ways to do things better. So it may be that this is just the first of many deep sea explorations that build on the foundation that's

set by the Challenger. And you know, with whe it being one of the virgin properties, it's only a matter of time for Sir Richard is trying to figure out some way to take tourists down there. Well, I've already read that he's looking at he's already invested in other forms of submarine travel that well, you know, you can buy a ticket to go on these submarine or submersible UH journeys, although they are not designed to go as

deep as the Challenger goes. And in fact, we should also add that while the Challenger sounds really really advanced, deep Flight has not rested. UH. Deep Flight has continued to develop submersibles, including the I think there's one called

the super Falcon. The super Falcon is very similar in design to the Challenger, but I think if it can actually fit two people, not just one, and it doesn't go as deep as the the the Challenger does, but it's it's it's like a faster, sleeker version of the Challenger, but again not built to withstand the intense pressure that you would find in a place like the Mariana Trench. Personally, I do want to say one thing to whomever does eventually pilot this first trip, because you never know things

can change between now and when it launches. Be careful because I read a book and in that book, the megalodon still exists in the Mariana Trench, and I'm just saying, those sharks are enormous, So you've gotta be careful when you're down there because you never know when you run into a megalodon. Okay, all right, there's a whole look about it. It's called meg I've considered it a documentary, just like Jaws. Yeah, yeah, the documentary job. So guys,

thank you for listening. Uh. If you have any requests, you can email them to us. That address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can let us know on Twitter and Facebook are handled there is tech Stuff h s W. We thank you again Nate for your wonderful suggestion. Hope everything is going well across the pond, and we will talk to all of you again really soon for more on this and thousands

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