(slow dramatic music)
- [Kathy] I'm the first person to both fly in space
and touch the deepest point in the ocean.
My missions have taken me over 2 million feet
above sea level
and 35,853 feet below sea level.
I've seen things no other human being has,
and they've absolutely changed me
in a lot of ways.
I'm Kathy Sullivan,
I'm an oceanographer and astronaut.
My interest in science showed up
at a very early age.
I really had a lust for adventure and travel
and exploration.
My first space flight was in October of 1984.
After 15 years as an astronaut,
I made my way back to earth
to focus on the oceans.
I've always thought that it's too bad
that we never created a NASA for the deepest,
deepest parts of the sea.
We know more about our moon and Mars
than we do about the deep sea.
So little is known about the shape of the bottom.
So one of the key objectives was mapping
the deep sea floor.
- [Man] 10, 9, 8
- [Kathy] Deep sea submersible dives
and the space shuttle flights can be pretty different.
- [Man] Lift off.
(rocket roaring)
- [Kathy] On the space shuttle,
it took us eight and a half minutes
to go from zero miles an hour to orbital velocity,
17,500 miles an hour.
It amounts to riding a bomb.
When you get into orbit you're
a couple hundred miles above the earth.
Any direction that you look,
you can see probably nearly a thousand miles.
You get 16 sunrises
and 16 sunsets in every 24 hour day.
You're just stunned by the number of stars
that you can see so that there kind of isn't really
an inky black of space.
that's anything like the inky black of the deep sea.
When the bottom of the ocean,
in contrast,
was like the world's smoothest,
calmest elevator ride.
And it took us four hours
to go from the surface
to nearly 36,000 feet.
It is kind of like a magic school bus.
I mean,
you're sitting inside this cozy little metal sphere.
You might be munching a tuna fish sandwich,
and yet outside that sphere,
pressures about 1100 times greater
than it is here on the surface of the earth.
It's pitch dark,
except for what light you bring with you
on the submarine.
We could maybe see 30 feet
in whatever direction we were looking out the view port.
It was like a moonscape or an underwater desert.
There really is,
in a lot of ways,
harder to explore and understand the ocean.
(slow bright music)
I spent a fair amount
of time living in these complex machines.
I think intense experiences deepen
the value that you put on family,
on home.
So I look back at my life
and I see vastly more blessing than sacrifice
to actually have those experiences
and to deepen our understanding of our planet
and how many ways we depend on it.
That to me is all blessing.
We are all sharing this one home,
this one little spaceship earth.
We have to look at it as
a place that you cherish and a place you want
to protect.
We're on it together and we're intimately connected.