Update:
Equipment failure has postponed the launch of Garriott de Cayeux's trip until early July.

Original story:
AUSTIN, Texas -- A local explorer is preparing to set a record as the first human to visit the deepest ocean depths after having orbited Earth in the space station and venturing to both poles.

Austin astronaut, game developer, and entrepreneur Richard Garriott de Cayeux departed the capital city early Monday for a long journey to the western Pacific Ocean, where he'll ride in a submarine made of titanium to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

It'll be a long, dark dive to the deepest known point on Earth. It's called Challenger Deep and is located nearly seven miles below the ocean surface.

In the above video, Garriott de Cayeux describes to our Chief Meteorologist Burton Fitzsimmons what he expects to see and do while at the bottom of the ocean, including a search for extremophile life.

After reaching Challenger Deep, Garriott de Cayeux will be in a very exclusive club. He’ll join retired NASA astronaut Kathy Sullivan as one of only two people to have orbited the Earth and reached the deepest ocean depth. Sullivan became the first woman to reach Challenger Deep earlier this month.

In addition to recently visiting both the North Pole and South Pole, Garriott de Cayeux lived and worked in Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station during the fall of 2008.  He has explored all seven continents and taken several deep sea dives to targets such as the Titanic.

Here is a transcript of our interview:

BF:  Our guest today is an entrepreneur and very successful video game developer who's used his earnings to explore from the North Pole to the South Pole and everything in between to orbiting the Earth in the space station, and now he's headed to one of the greatest depths of our oceans. We are so happy to have with us today Mr. Richard Garriott, Austin's astronaut. Hello.

RG:  Hey, Burton. It is great to be with you again. Love to love to chat about adventuring.

BF:  You have a doozy here! You're headed to Challenger Deep, which is nearly seven miles below the surface of the Western Pacific Ocean. What takes you there?

RG:  Well, it's interesting. You know, they've only been before the summer three expeditions that have ever gone to that depth. And the first two of those vehicles were one-time-use vehicles 60 years ago, and then about 10 years ago, filmmaker James Cameron went down in his own one-person submersible. But then last summer, a gentleman named Victor Vescovo created this new submarine that holds two people and can be used to make repeated dives to this depth. And so last year, he made the third ever dive [to] that depth. And this summer we're setting up a campaign of science missions with that submarine to go not only survey the entire length of the of the Marianas Trench, but then they're going to move it on and do similar things in the deepest parts of all the other oceans.

BF:  So a lot of science is going on. We've been hearing about this in the news from retired astronaut Kathy Sullivan, the first woman to make it down to that very location just a few days ago and literally mountain near Vanessa O'Brien, I'm told went yesterday. So this is quickly become an area of extreme tourism - extreme, as you put it - an exploration because fewer people have been there than have been on the moon.

RG:  Yeah, that's exactly right. And in fact, in fact, I don't know exactly what the percentage is, but a good many if not the majority of the people involved in this expedition are members of the Explorers Club of which I'm vice president of it and Kathy is one of the honorary board members of as well. The research is coming out of this expedition is all being put in the public domain and so it really takes all of us choosing to participate and help out logistically and get a chance to participate personally that is allowing all this great science will be done at these depths, which will then be, you know, offered up in the public domain.

BF:  Folks that follow your adventures or have checked out your book "Explore/Create" will know that you've been to the Titanic.  You have certainly done some real interesting diving and it wasn't all without some very tense moments. Richard, what scares you?

RG:  With spaceflight, which is, obviously, statistically there's an element of danger. When it comes to submersibles, actually no one  has ever died in a submersible that is capable of diving below 1000 meters. So these should be very safe. But I imagine you're thinking about the opening story there in my in my book where I described how, you know, whenever you undertake an expedition you, you get to do something responsible, you need to really understand well, all the safety procedures on the vehicle and make sure that you're well prepared - the vehicles, [make sure] the team is well prepared. And in my dive the Titanic, I felt that that was all true until we ended up underneath the Titanic looking at the props, and we bumped into the bottom of the Titanic. And suddenly a whoosh of debris came down on top of the sub, pushed [us] onto the ground. And then you start revealing all these safety procedures. You go like wait, no matter how much weight we dump, we're not going to get through the Titanic. We normally have a little signal balloon ringing sent up. We'll go through the Titanic. You try to radio anybody -- all the acoustic phones are line of sight. So no way to make the communications, so you are literally incommunicado, undiscoverable, stuck at the bottom of the ocean underneath the stern of the Titanic. And so you're like, Okay, well, this could be the end. You know, so we have, you know, three days of supplies on board. But fortunately, you know, the only thing you could do at that time was really just sit and wait for the visibility to clear out the bottom for a few hours, wondering if we were all doomed. And, and then once you could see a little bit out through your portholes, and it cleared out, we didn't see any wreckage piled on us. We then attempted to lift off the bottom and we could, fortunately. What fell was mostly things called rusticles, kind of, ah, these growths that are all over the Titanic. And we could turn the vehicle around and then correct along the bottom to get far enough away from it to be able to get up without bumping it. And so it all turned out well it was but it was an interesting lesson of, you know, you can think these things through very carefully and it's still not hard for something unexpected to pop up. And they want to make sure that you and your equipments and your team are as well prepared as possible for these moments but but your initial question was what scares you? And the answer was I think even then it wasn't really scared, you're just going there, you're resolved you're into it, you're in the middle of it. You're just here to figure it out and problem solving them deal the ramifications later.

BF:  It was a different mission, different ocean, different parameters and different vehicle you mentioned. I believe this one's called the limiting factor, made of titanium. Talk a little bit about that and the preparations for this mission.

RG:  This submarine has, you know, a couple inches (90mm) of titanium. It's a pretty close to a perfect sphere of a little under six feet in diameter. The rest of the propulsion and energy and sampling trays and light moons and cameras are outside. That little cocoon is protecting you from the 8,000 pounds or, excuse me, 18,000 pounds per square inch of pressure. That's actually enough pressure that the vehicle will measurably shrink due to that compression, and not only is building a sphere to not pop hard that you know whether or not we're thinking about pressure, but also don't forget this has windows has a hatch. And there's penetrations for electrical signals and such. And so that's, you know, not too surprising necessarily very hard to do. And so the windows for example, even though there's very small windows on the inside, the hall is much thicker at the windows and those windows are deep wedge shaped pieces that are, you know, compressed in toward the ship at the same time, but are much thicker, you know, quite a few inches in thickness to make sure they don't crack or pop into the capsule under that pressure. But the whole thing is actually tested in pressured chambers to significantly beyond the depths that are even possible to reach in the ocean. And so again it should be in our outside of if the unforeseen issues that are more likely to cause problems then the things have been playing for.

BF:  So hearing this is a two-person submersible, what do you expect to see out of those windows as you travel down into the depths?

RG:  What's interesting is on the way down, you know, you'll start the long four hour dive and then you still spend a few hours on the bottom but you know, two-thirds of the whole experience is sinking and rising. And you know, the first few hundred meters that you'll be close enough to the surface where there will be familiar life forms. Because of there's where there's like when there's light there's plant life and where there's plant life there's animals will eat it and then we'll meet those animals. But then you get into the zone of darkness and then it becomes...much life thinner, but that doesn't mean zero. Periodically on these deep dives, you know, we'll swing out the light booms and turn them on just to see what's floating by. And there's a lot of very exotic, you know, filamentary creatures that live in this dark zone that are just slowly floating around and wiggling around and looking for little bits of monitor, drift down dead debris, you know, to float down from the sky above them. But then at the bottom, you get to actually another kind of life zone, you get to a place where there has been a rain from far above us, not only solids that are precipitating out, but also dead fish and plankton and other things that die organically evolve to the bottom. And that gives enough energy resources for a whole nother ecosystem. Now, what's unique about this one is it's so deep, that it takes really special adaptations to survive at these kind of pressures or any kind of creature to because they're they're also under the same compression, even the organelles inside their cells are under the same compression. And yet they have managed to somehow evolve away to do the chemical processes necessary for life. And so that's why this is not only just interesting to go see to find things that have never been seen before. And most every time they're they're doing that now I pretty much every day. Have you see things that have never been seen, but also to bring some of that back. Because to see how life has adapted helps, not only helps you often find directly chemicals that are useful modernly on the surface, but it also helps teach you pathways that you can use while exploring new medicines, or exploring new types of biology or you look for in space even by studying animals that have adapted to these extremes that you and I are not used to.

BF:  You mentioned mapping the trench. Are you going to take part in any of that science? Are you participating in any experiments yourself?

RG:  Yeah, so each of the dives is planned on a slightly different section. In addition to the main submarine, there's actually three remotely operated vehicles that go down at the same time. And the reason why that's important, it became apparent to me how important it was. But I used to dive on the mirror submersibles, there's a pair of them. And having a pair was was marvelous because you could like if you were taking a picture of a deep wreck, for example, that we went and surveyed, having one look at it, where your light is right beside your camera only let you see the front face. You really need to get a light around to the side in the back is your well note with your well that room there, too. You need to set lights around a scene to really understand the scene dimensionally. And so that's what these ROV's do is they all have more lights they all have more camera all independently drivable and so you can really study the ocean floor in a much more detailed way than has been done with previous deep diving vehicles before.

BF:  I know our viewers are gonna want to know about this. Was this a one-time ticket purchase or are you invested in this company in the long term? How did you get involved?

RG:  Actually, I'm not invested in this particular submarine. But the maker has previously worked on submarines that I have been a part of. So this is somebody I know from, from the businesses that I have been involved in with deep ocean exploration. How I got involved in this exact trip particularly is when they were forming it they since they knew me, they called me up early in January and asked me if I wanted to participate. At that time, unfortunately, I was actually scheduled to be on a different expedition, I was actually planning to be on the island of Pitcairn where the Mutiny on the Bounty mutineers have settled in, and 50 of their descendants still live there. But, uh, but understandably, they're not that interested in having visitors from the outside world right now. Right. And so that, that one got put on hold, but he got put on hold after I passed on joining this expedition, but as fate would have it, the same COVID issues have been prevented some others from being able to join this expedition instead that opened up my slot again so so I very happily I got the call the week ago, the slot and opened up. And so here I am now scrambling to get COVID tests and I make sure to make sure I can travel through Guam and get all my gear collected down here in Austin together and connecting with schools have been collected a lot of schools around the globe. Teachers around the globe try to get experiments running in for me with a relatively short order. A lot of these things often take I'll spend a year often collecting experiment activities and educational outreach and we're doing this one in a in a hurry.

BF:  Let's talk more about the pandemic preparations. I mean, how is it being an adventure during the pandemic? So many of us would just love to leave our house much less go to such a faraway place like this.

RG:  Yeah, well, of course. You know, we're living in a very complex time, both from a medical standpoint, political and social standpoint.  You know, there's a lot of, obviously, very pressing and complicated issues for us all to deal with, in our homes or in our cities, in our countries right now. And so yeah, I think it's quite fortunate to get the chance to, to join this expedition. And, of course, as everyone knows, you know, we, despite our lockdown, we need, you know, we need to we still need to progress and we still have to do our work, whether we're broadcasting from our homes, or whatever other work you do, we got to figure out a way to do it. And so in the case of this expedition, just like Pitcairn got shut down, and they just said, don't come. Guam is a U.S. territory, but they've had so little problems there that they require everyone who comes there and see within 72 hours previously to have had a COVID test. The ship also has so far had none no one there has been sick. So they're equally careful to make sure that you are testing I've already had two coding tests already myself, just to you know, figure out the process.  And so yeah, we're just being very, very careful to do this. But the most, the most dangerous part of my trip is probably gonna be the airplane flight from here to Dallas to Hawaii to Guam.

BF:  That's amazing to say given what you're about to do.  All right, I want to shift gears real quick. Apogee of Fear:  has Tom Cruise ever seen that movie? 

RG:  To my knowledge, he has not seen it. However it is it is funny that you know when the news first broke about Tom Cruise wants to go to the ISS and film a movie. And of course, we quickly pointed out that a movie has already been filmed on the space station so we'll be the first because Apogee fears the first somewhat tongue in cheek but also there is a serious element about shooting in space. shooting a film in space is not trivial. Shooting films at all is not but shooting it when everything's folded when your camera is floating away and you're accurate as a significant extra complexity, a lot of which I did learn the hard way from doing it with Apogee of Fear. And even though it's a small, personal, short project, I think there is important learning that can be passed on. And so interestingly, though, while I've never talked to Tom, we do have a mutual friend or two at the Explorers Club. So we have our connections attempting to connect. And you never know, I think I may get a chance to pass on a few words of wisdom.

BF:  I think that if nothing else, that would be very appropriate. Well, I had to ask about that, of course.  So this is expected to be a two-week expedition. And then you'll be returning to Austin, and we look forward to seeing some incredible pictures. What else do you think you'd be bringing back? I know you said you're going to collect some of what you find at the bottom of the ocean. What else is going to go on?

RG:  Yeah, well, I'm hoping well, that most of the data is most everything being brought up. There's a big science team on board the ship, the things we bring up mostly right into that science team, but I'm actually thinking that one of the things they're probably not looking for in that lab is some of the things that I have looked for in one of my previous trips, which is extremely file life forums. And starting with when he went down to hydrothermal vents, we found high temperature and complex chemical extremophiles that live down there. Do the same thing. Recently, I went to dangling a volcano in Nicaragua and also brought back some fluids in the mud from around some events that also showed similar extremophiles, different kinds, and even hot springs when you go on vacation traveling around nighted states. Yep, skewed level, those hot springs. It's common, it's not uncommon to find some extremophiles on them. And so I'm thinking that there's reasonable eyes that at these depths, there's high pressure extremophiles, and so I'm hoping they scoop up literally just a scoop of mud off the bottom. And if they don't have the ability on board to do that analysis, there's some labs that I've worked with where we can try to extract and get another science from from the mind at the deep.

BF:  There you go. Well, it is exciting to again vicariously be exploring through you. And we wish you safe travels. I hope you stay safe and stay healthy. Godspeed, Richard, and Huzzah!.

RG:  Thank you very kindly and I'll be back in two weeks with more pictures and videos and stories to tell.

BF:  Sounds great. Talk to you then.

For more:  https://richardgarriott.com/