Trieste submarine gal of gasoline11/25/2023 ![]() The Trieste rarely stayed in the same configuration from year to year. Each dive revealed equipment issues or opportunities to improve performance. While publicly touted as a scientific research vessel, the narrative explores the opportunities the Trieste offered for intelligence gathering and supporting other Cold War era national security initiatives.Īs laid out by Polmar and Mather, the history of the Trieste and her crews is a story of iterative development and continuous improvement. The book is a worthy companion to Sontag and Drew’s 1998 book Blind Man’s Bluff in that Opening the Great Depths provides superb details specific to the Trieste and her crews over her thirty-year career. There are multiple references to the Trieste engaging in classified dives where the reader is left to wonder just exactly what the crew of the Trieste were doing deep under the sea throughout the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The balance between mission objectives and the functionality of the craft and safety of the crew are fascinating reading.Īnother fascinating element of the story is what’s left unsaid. These operations are conveyed with a solid eye for the details not just of the technical search, but the significant challenges the sailors faced in using their ‘bleeding edge’ technology. Trieste’s unique capability to dive deeper than any other manned submersible craft in the US inventory led to deployments to the Atlantic Ocean to assist in the search for the USS Thresher and USS Scorpion, as well as participating in the search and recovery operations from the Palomares nuclear weapons incident. While often characterized as a research vessel, the Trieste and her crews of Navy submariners would be repeatedly called upon to participate in national security activities. Instead, the story transitions from that of the purely scientific-political objective of being the first to the bottom of the sea. It might seem that once the initial goal of the Trieste’s inventors had been achieved, that the craft might have been decommissioned or replaced with a new model. It’s an engaging tale, fraught with technical and political challenges. The story documents the refitting of the Trieste in preparation for the attempt on a scientific record – descending to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench. Polmar and Mather provide an excellent narrative of the transfer of the craft and operators to U.S. A good innovator needs to be a good self-promoter and be willing to seize opportunity when it presents itself.Īnd it’s those opportunities that drive the narrative forward starting with the prototype vehicle being obtained by the United States Navy in 1958. The travails faced by the Piccard’s in getting the Trieste built show that the more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s an illuminating look into the state of science and industry in the years leading up to and following the Second World War. The book hews to a conventional historical narrative that starts with the career of aeronaut Auguste Piccard and his son Jacques as they envision and design a unique underwater craft that would become the submersible Trieste. Opening the Great Ocean Depths: The Bathyscape Trieste is a historical account of the inception, construction and operation of an underwater craft designed to literally “go where no one has gone before” – into the deepest depths of the world’s oceans. Trieste, and her crew of Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, famously reached the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench on January 23, 1960. The Trieste was one of the earliest of the submersibles designed from the pressure hull outward as a way for a human crew to explore the deep ocean and ultimately, to explore the very bottom of the sea. Mather bring the origins of the deep submersible operations to the surface in their recent book Opening the Great Ocean Depths: The Bathyscape Trieste. While not as glamourous as the attack boats and boomers, research submersibles like the Trieste, Alvin and the NR-1 performed critical missions and often operated under the cloak of deep waters. During the Cold War that phrase referred to both how quiet the boats were as well as the often-clandestine nature of their work. The United States Navy submarine branch has long carried the nickname as the “Silent Service”.
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