Victor Vescovo is the only person on Earth, indeed in history, to have climbed the Seven Summits – the highest mountains of the world’s seven continents – to have descended to the deepest points of the world’s five oceans, and to have been into space, as a passenger on board New Shepard, as part of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin NS-21 mission. We shall leave to one side for a moment the fact that Vescovo has also skied to both the North and South Poles, which is very much his equivalent of a walk in the park.

‘People say, “What’s the best, what’s the most fun you’ve had?”’ Vescovo leans back in his chair, his hands folded on the table in front of him, pondering the question. He is 57, of medium height and build. His snowy white beard and his hair tied back in a long ponytail give him a distinctly rakish appearance. His manner is matter-of-fact, his conversation quiet and measured – as if to say, nothing here to get excited about; his gaze is piercing. After he has shaken your hand, you are rather relieved to find it still attached to your wrist.

‘Each experience is very different,’ he goes on. ‘They’re like a triangle: the highest mountain, the deepest part of the ocean and then space. They’re very different, but they all rhyme.

‘By that I mean, going to the summit of Everest is an incredibly physical experience; it’s very challenging mentally, physically, spiritually even, to keep clawing up that mountain in those intense conditions, so when you get there it’s a great relief. But it’s easily the most dangerous of the three.

‘Going to the bottom of the ocean is much more technical, much more cerebral; you can’t see very far – 30 metres at most. It feels very ancient, when you get to the bottom of the ocean. You can’t stay there very long. And that incredible pressure is omnipresent; you can’t see it or feel it, but you know it’s there, 16,000lbs per square inch, bearing down on you. You would be dead in milliseconds if there were a catastrophic issue. It’s just a much more ominous, quiet experience.

‘And then space was like going to an intense rock concert, where you climb up and strap yourself to a 10-storey bomb and ascend at Mach 3 vertically, you’re vaulted into zero-g, and then you come screaming back down at five-g, parachutes open, and before you know it, it’s all over, and you’re going, “That was incredible!”.

‘So they’re all very different experiences – and yet all of them show a facet of our same Earth. And for me to be able to witness all that with my own eyes has been a very extraordinary privilege.’

Vescovo is in a meeting room in a hotel in Edinburgh, where he has flown from his home in Texas to talk at a conference organised by a manufacturer of oceanic sonar mapping equipment. There was not an empty seat in the house.

The ocean covers more than 70 per cent of our planet, he said, and 75 per cent of that remains unexplored. It is mankind’s great challenge – and his great dream – to create a complete map of the global ocean, and he appealed for more funding to reach the $2.6 billion necessary to achieve this objective.

He talked about diving in the Tonga Trench – ‘a very dangerous place, there’s a lot of volcanic activity there’ – and the Java Trench and the New Hebrides Trench and the Mariana Trench, where he reached depths no man had ever reached before. 

He admonished governments that make deep sea exploration difficult, and in some cases impossible: ‘I will never do anything with Indonesia because they were so hostile.’

‘It’s fun being a pirate!’ he said.

The response was a mixture of loud applause and a palpable kind of awe, the unspoken question hanging in the air. What kind of person does all this, and why?

Vescovo was born in Dallas, Texas. His father was a commercial real estate broker, and his mother a nurse. As a child he read a lot of science fiction and dreamt of being an astronaut.

After attending Stanford University, he went on to gain a degree at MIT in defence and arms control, and a masters at Harvard Business School: ‘I test well…’

Having learnt to fly when he was 19, he had the ambition of becoming a military pilot, but he failed the eyesight test. Instead, he went into business, making a fortune in private equity, at the same time serving for 20 years in the US Navy Reserve, a spell that included a tour of duty as a targeting officer in the Kosovo War, and then being based in Pearl Harbor, analysing terrorist networks in Indonesia and the Philippines.

When he was 23 he took a solo trip to Kenya on a safari, and saw Mount Kilimanjaro for the first time. ‘One of the guides pointed out that you can get a guide, get some equipment and climb that if you want to. And I said, “Really? I’ve never done that. Why not?”’

It was the beginning of his ambition to climb each of the Seven Summits.

He had to abandon his first attempt to reach the top of the highest, Mount Everest, because of frostbitten fingers. But he returned two years later to complete the challenge.

Climbing Mount Aconcagua, in the Argentine Andes, he almost died when he was swept away in a rock slide and had to be helicoptered out. He spent five months in physical therapy.

‘They call it climber’s amnesia,’ he says. ‘After a while I thought, “Well, it wasn’t that bad,” and I went back to the mountain a year and half later and climbed it.’

Having achieved the Seven Summits and undertaken ‘a little polar expedition’, skiing to both poles, Vescovo says he was ‘shocked’ to learn that no human being had been to the bottom of all of Earth’s five oceans – the Arctic, the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian and the Southern.

‘That just really captured my imagination and frustration,’ he says. ‘How could this be that we had not actually done that? But I believed that it was possible, and I started thinking about what it would take, technically, financially, organisationally. Solving problems like that is what I do, and I put a plan together and put it into motion.’

The deepest point on earth is the Challenger Deep, almost 11,000m down (nearly seven miles) in the Mariana Trench. By comparison, Mount Everest is a little under 9,000m high. The Mariana Trench had been dived only twice in history, first in 1960, by Swiss engineer Jacques Piccard and American naval officer Don Walsh, and then, in 2012, by the filmmaker James Cameron, who achieved the record for the world’s deepest dive, in a submersible called the Deepsea Challenger, descending to a depth of 10,908m.

But the Puerto Rico Trench in the Atlantic, the Java Trench in the Indian Ocean, the South Sandwich Trench in the Southern Ocean, and the Molloy Hole in the Arctic, had never been reached by a human being.

Vescovo had spent a lot of time on the ocean, but knew next to nothing about what lay at the bottom of it, let alone how to get there. He set about educating himself. ‘I’m just a very curious person, and I love learning new things. But it’s like anything – why do we go to school and go to college, mainly so we can learn how to learn and acquire information relatively quickly and hopefully well, so we can do any number of things.’

Vescovo wanted a vessel capable of multiple dives over an intensive period of time. He contacted a Florida-based manufacturer named Triton Submarines, whose main business is building custom-made subs as toys for wealthy yacht owners. The submersible that Vescovo commissioned, helped design and had built, named Limiting Factor, was of a different order altogether – the most advanced deep-diving submersible on the planet.

Rather than having the traditional cigar shape of a submarine, the vessel was designed to go not forwards but down, and looks more like a suitcase that has been squashed by baggage handlers. Its 90mm titanium shell is capable of withstanding 16,000lbs per inch of pressure at the bottom of the sea floor.

In need of a support boat, he purchased a former US Navy vessel that had been used to track submarines, which Vescovo renamed Pressure Drop.

In 2018 Vescovo launched the Five Deeps Expedition, to dive to the deepest point of all five oceans by the end of September 2019. He did it one month ahead of schedule.

Having been to the bottom of the Atlantic, Southern and Indian Oceans, on 28 April 2019, Vescovo ventured deeper underwater than anyone had before, to a depth of 10,935m – that’s 25-27m lower than where Cameron claimed to have gone, a technical achievement that has been compared to landing on the moon.

There is one person who has disputed this. In an interview with The New York Times, James Cameron contended that the bottom of the Challenger Deep was flat so it was impossible for Vescovo to have gone deeper than he had. Vescovo responded by saying that his team had ‘assaulted each of these locations with a level of technology that had never existed before’ to find the deepest point, and that even a margin of error of seven or eight metres would still put him deeper than Cameron.

‘We have a scientific disagreement about the character and depth of the Challenger Deep,’ Vescovo says now. ‘He has insisted that no one could go deeper because it’s completely flat, and after 15 visits to the Challenger Deep, I disagree. So it’s a scientific disagreement, and it’s unfortunate that it has come up as an issue when both of us are dedicated to advancing marine technology and marine science.

‘We share so many experiences. We’re the only two people that have helped design, build and then pilot a submersible to the bottom of the ocean. That’s a very small club, and I respect him immensely.’ It’s a diplomatic answer.

You will have gathered by now that Vescovo is a man who welcomes a challenge, who likes to test himself to the extremes, a man who relishes living, as he puts it, ‘a very rich life’. But this is not simply a matter of diving to the bottom of the world’s oceans for the thrill of it.

There are clear scientific objectives in ocean mapping, marine biology – he has recorded several unknown aquatic species – and marine geology, in particular how tectonic plates create tsunamis, and what can be done to predict those better.

There is also marine archaeology. Some of his most exciting dives, he says, involved finding the two deepest shipwrecks in history, in the Philippine Trench, two US warships that were sunk by the Japanese Navy in 1944 in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. The deepest is a US Navy destroyer escort, the USS Samuel B Roberts, at a depth of 6,895m – twice that of the wreck of the Titanic. 

At that depth there is little oxygen or aquatic life, and unlike the Titanic, which is decomposing, both warships are ‘pristine’, Vescovo says. The film he shot of the Samuel B Roberts gained the most views by far on YouTube across all expeditions of the Five Deeps. 

‘There is a tremendous historical interest in the ships that went down fighting. And having been in the US Navy for 20 years, it was very special for me to find these,’ he says. ‘I received overwhelming support from the extended families of those that died there, because I think it gives them some sense of closure. As we say, steel doesn’t lie, so we were able to fully analyse the wrecks and understand what happened in the battle.’

There are currently only two submersibles in the world capable of going to the very bottom of the ocean, Cameron’s Deepsea Challenger now being out of action. One is Vescovo’s, the other is owned by the Chinese government, which maintains a veil of secrecy over its marine expeditions. 

‘Whenever we have dived into deep ocean trenches or on repetitive dives into the Mariana Trench, we have to caveat it by saying that this is everything we know about what is happening that is not Chinese,’ Vescovo says. ‘They’ll publish some news stories now and again but they’re sporadic and they’re not comprehensive.’

Vescovo has promised to give all the data he obtained mapping the sea by sonar to the Nippon Foundation’s Seabed 2030 project, which aims to map the entire ocean by the start of the next decade. What seems clear, he says, is that the Chinese have been following closely in his footsteps, diving first in the Challenger Deep and then in the Kermadec Trench, off the coast of New Zealand. In 2020 Vescovo took Taiwan-born Dr Ying-Tsong Lin, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, on a dive to the Challenger Deep, depriving the Chinese of a propaganda opportunity. ‘It was their intention to take the first Chinese and first woman to the deepest point, but we upset their plans a bit in both respects.’

There are clear economic reasons for deep sea exploration. The ocean bed is a repository of polymetallic nodules – concretions of minerals, primarily manganese, copper, cobalt and nickel, that could be processed into useful materials, although at present, Vescovo says, the cost of mining them is prohibitive.

But the Mariana Trench would be of particular interest strategically to the Chinese, because of its close proximity to Guam, site of the US Navy’s Western Pacific base. ‘Anyone would be naive to think there isn’t some degree of potential military application for surveillance or otherwise.’ By comparison, the US government, he says, ‘has apparently had no interest in what we’ve been doing, and that I believe is a shame’.

He has received no government or institutional funding for his expeditions. It cost him $50 million of his own money to complete the Five Deeps. ‘What strikes me is there are so many well-off individuals in this world that would think nothing of buying a business jet that costs more than the entire expedition of the Five Deeps did, or buying a yacht that costs twice as much. Just the cost of maintenance for a yacht that size would pay for an expedition conducting good science.

‘So I’m often struggling with people that in some respects are incredibly successful and yet where’s the imagination? Where’s the drive, not just to be supremely comfortable but to actually contribute to science and technological development. That’s what drives me.

‘I would be more than happy to be on my deathbed with nothing left in my bank account but having spent it on scientific advancement, and even a little bit of adventure. I think these are important things.’

Vescovo’s sole commercial sponsor for the Five Deeps expedition was the watch company Omega. It’s a requirement in deep-diving submersibles to have an analogue time-keeping instrument, in case of an electronic failure. Preparing for the Five Deeps expedition, learning that Omega produced the first diving watch, Vescovo visited his local Omega store in Dallas.

‘They said, “Oh, are you going to go diving?” And I said, “Well, yes, I’m planning to go to the bottom of all the oceans.” I’m not sure they believed me.’ As we talk, he is wearing the watch he bought – a titanium Seamaster – which he has since worn on every dive he’s made, and on his journey into space on the Blue Origin rocket.

Omega invited Vescovo to Switzerland, leading to a partnership and the offer to make a special watch that would be attached to the outside of the submersible, capable of functioning at the deepest point of the ocean. ‘They have a great commitment to innovation,’ he says. ‘They love the development of mechanical devices, as I do. So we share a lot of the same values.’

The company produced three prototype Ultra Deep Professional watches, just in time for the descent to the bottom of the Challenger Deep. Two were attached to the robotic arm of the submersible, which is for gathering mineral samples from the ocean floor, and the third to the lander, a separate device that goes down with the submersible to act as a navigation beacon and a filming platform.

On the first descent, the lander got stuck on the sea floor. A mission was launched, with Patrick Lahey, who had helped design and build Limiting Factor, piloting the vessel, to search for the lander and using the robotic arm retrieve it. Vescovo was on the deck of the Pressure Drop when they swung the lander on board. ‘And the timepiece was still ticking. It had been at the bottom of the ocean for a little over two full days.’ He describes it as ‘the deepest marine salvage operation in history’.

For Vescovo an important part of preparing for every descent is to go to the galley and make himself a tuna sandwich to take with him on his journey to the deep. Never cheese, never salami. Tuna. ‘If you’re asking a sailor going into the deep ocean if there’s any superstition involved… yes. My wonderful sister made me a small stuffed penguin which I take on every mission.’

While he joked in his conference address about being ‘a pirate’, he is far from piratical in his approach to diving. ‘It’s businesslike. It’s about meticulous planning, checking the system – making my tuna fish sandwich – all the little elements that go into making sure that everything is good to go.’

The submersible, he says, is built to the same safety standards as a commercial airliner. ‘I was able to go down to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, which had only been done once before, and I took Prince Albert of Monaco with me. One can imagine he doesn’t just jump into a submersible with any person. 

But I think what I’ve been able to show people is that while I do many dangerous things I do them – like my hero Roald Amundsen, the great explorer – methodically, with great preparation and mitigating as much risk as possible. So that when you actually pursue the objective in those dangerous conditions you’re doing so with the assurance that you’ve thought about everything that can be thought about and you will come back.’

That, alas, was not the fate of the five people who died on the Titan submersible in June, on a passenger dive to the Titanic. Two were friends of Vescovo. The vessel’s builder and pilot, Stockton Rush, had made several dives to the Titanic before the fatal accident, but had been cautioned by the Marine Technology Society not to continue diving because the submersible was inherently unsafe and not commercially certified. ‘The whole industry had concerns,’ Vescovo says.

So why had the passengers joined the dive?

‘There is this intense desire to go to the Titanic, and they were the only operation doing so. And the fact that the owner and constructor of that submersible was the pilot I think gave them a false sense of security: “If he’s going it must be safe.” But there’s an obvious risk in that assessment in assuming that person was completely objective about the safety of that vehicle, which he was not.’

If you put it to Vescovo that his achievements are extraordinary, he demurs. Rather, he believes that all human beings are capable of extraordinary things if only they put their minds to it. ‘I’m not Nobel laureate smart. I’m not an Olympic athlete, physically. 

And yet I’ve been able to do all these things basically because I decided to do them, and applied the resources and the persistence to get them done. And I think that people don’t push themselves near to the point where they can do extraordinary things, which I think is a bit unfortunate, because we all have incredible gifts and potential that is often unrealised.’

The only time he raises his voice in the conversation is when I ask whether it frustrates him how apathetic and dilatory so many people are. ‘Yes! Yes! Yes! That is a common frustration I have – seeing so much apathy, so much lassitude, so much distraction with things that don’t matter when there’s so much that needs to be done, if people would just put their minds to it and didn’t get all wrapped up in themselves so much, or political aspects of things that make no difference.’

Has that side of his character had a debilitating effect on his personal life? ‘Absolutely.’ He laughs. ‘Something has to give.’

It is not a surprise, he says, that he has never married or had children. ‘There are so many more things in my life that I have prioritised – my business career, my naval career, exploration – all these other aspects. No one wants to be a low priority in what should be the most significant relationship they have. And I have had things that are a much higher priority. There’s only so much energy that we have, and maybe that’s just my fate.’

Would he describe himself as lonely?

‘I’m very comfortable being alone. I would be remiss in saying there are not fleeting moments of loneliness but that’s a somewhat self-indulgent emotion that just doesn’t really take with me. I’m too curious, too busy and too fascinated.’

Last year Vescovo sold the Hadal Exploration System, which comprises the research vessel Pressure Drop and the submersible Limiting Factor, to the American billionaire Gabe Newell, who has established his own marine research organisation, Inkfish. But Vescovo has not abandoned his commitment to marine exploration. His organisation Caladan Oceanic is now in the concept stage, exploring the viability of building another submersible, which he says will ‘move the technology along’.

He is also the CEO of a bio-tech company, researching novel genetic therapies to treat incurable human diseases.

‘I wear many hats,’ he says. ‘And if I have a great passion it is the belief that if there’s one thing that has allowed us to survive on this planet, bring people out of poverty, cure disease, make life worth living, it has been technological advancement. And if in my very small way I can help advance technology along this dimension, and others I’m involved in, then I think my life will have been worthwhile.’