Fewer than 600 people have ever been to space. Fewer than 10 have ever reached the deepest point on Earth. Just one human has done both. Her name is Kathy Sullivan. She flew to space three times aboard the space shuttle during the 1980s and 1990s. And this weekend, Sullivan visited the bottom of the ocean.

This isn’t the first time Sullivan has made history. On October 11, 1984, the astronaut stepped outside in space and performed a spacewalk for more than three hours. On that day, Sullivan became the first American woman to do a spacewalk. More than 35 years later, she reached the deepest part of the ocean. That’s the Challenger Deep in the western Pacific Ocean. At age 68, she became the first woman to reach that deepest place on the planet.

Challenger Deep is 35,839 feet (10,924 m) below the surface. That’s in an area called the Mariana Trench. Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard became the first people to get there in 1960. Only a couple people have gone to the Challenger Deep since. They include Victor Vescovo, who reached the spot in 2019. This time, Sullivan and Vescovo went together.

Sullivan and Vescovo traveled to the Challenger Deep in a special submarine. Called the Limiting Factor, it’s the only vessel that’s able to go so deep in the water. Nearly 7 miles (11 km) under the waves, the pressure would crush any other boat. Sullivan and Vescovo stayed at the bottom for about 90 minutes. Then they needed about four hours to get back to the surface.

After their historic dive, Sullivan and Vescovo called the astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS). They talked with the astronauts floating more than 240 miles (400 km) over the ocean. “This was an extraordinary day, a once-in-a-lifetime day,” said Sullivan in a statement on Monday, “seeing the moonscape of the Challenger Deep and then comparing notes with my colleagues on the ISS.”


Updated June 9, 2020, 5:03 P.M. (ET)
By Russell Kahn (Russ)