The Quest

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CHAPTER ONE

AT SEA

NAUTOR’S SWAN

Heini Gustafsson keeps a room full of fabrics, knobs, and handles in her studio in Kronoby, Finland. As the head interior designer at Nautor’s Swan, she presents her customers with a smorgasbord of knick-knacks to furnish the transoceanic voyages the company’s yachts are built to withstand.

Twenty four miles west, at the Nautor’s Swan shipyard in coastal Jakobstad, the shell of a yacht named Ti-Coyo has been painted a shade of Davy’s gray, lined with white stripes where the boat meets the water. Just below the main deck, a white spear streaks across its 105-foot hull.

A crew installs the tanks, hydraulics, engine, and electric cabling—all the machinery that transforms this oddly shaped luxury home into a world-class yacht, all neatly concealed beneath the floorboards of the wood-grain saloon with the fabric sofas and panoramic views.

Every detail aboard Ti-Coyo has been handpicked by its anonymous owner, from the layout of the floor plan to the style of the electric plugs. Unprecedented requests, not uncommon in the custom yacht business, were heard, vetted for technical possibility, and obliged. “The quality and passion of our product is present in every detail of the build,” Gustafsson says.

Whoever commissioned Ti-Coyo, a superyacht that’s received plenty of attention in the elite sailing community, knew who he was dealing with. Nautor’s Swan has earned—and maintained—a reputation as a crafter of the world’s best designed and highest-performing yachts by adhering to the same manufacturing philosophy for nearly half a century. “Each and every Swan is designed, manufactured, and tested in-house in Finland,” says Leonardo Ferragamo, the company’s owner since buying the Finnish company in 1988. “This is the only way we can guarantee that every element meets our incredibly high standards.”

The boats, affectionately known by their owners as Swans, are hand-built from scratch in the village of Jakobstad, on the Finnish coast of the Baltic Sea. Their construction upholds the town’s proud shipbuilding tradition that dates back to the 1500s, spawning legends that the sea-savvy Finns could catch wind in knots, selling them to sailors in need. Centuries later, in 1966, Finnish seafarer Pekka Koskenkylä launched Nautor’s Swan, attracting a new generation of sailors to Finland—this time for yachts instead of knots.

The future yacht owners are involved in every step of production, often making multiple trips to Finland over the two years it takes to build a Swan. A visit to the boatyard introduces them to the team; they map out floor plans with architects and saloons with interior designers; they sift through a teak library at the shipyard to pick a unique grain for the wooden decks, walls, and built-in furniture.

Meanwhile, the Swan builders go through drafts of freehand conceptual sketches to understand what, specifically, about the yacht matters most to each owner. In time, the sketches become interactive 3-D images before eventually transforming into floating palaces.

“There’s a higher standard of safety, a higher standard of craftsmanship,” says Paul Glimcher, a lifelong sailor, neuroscientist, and owner of a second-generation Swan. “This shows up in a million ways. When you get your Swan, you get 10 three-ring binders with manuals, line drawings of your boat, and listing diagrams.”

Throughout the process, however, the yacht owners—and designers—meet but one constraint: Nautor’s Swans are ocean-going vessels designed to withstand 40,000 miles of sailing per year, through whatever seas Poseidon deals their way. “Nautor’s Swan is one of the only boat manufacturers who would think it’s a fine idea to sail across the Atlantic in the middle of winter,” Glimcher says. “Doing that with a stock, mass-produced boat would be a suicidal act.”

CHAPTER TWO

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CHAPTER TWO

IMMERSED

DEEPSEA CHALLENGER

In late March 2012, James Cameron, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence and the Academy Award-winning director of Avatar and Titanic, climbed into the cramped steel hatch of the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER, a Kawasaki-racing green and vertically-oriented submersible, and began his descent to the deepest known place on Earth, 35,787 feet (10,908 meters) beneath the surface. In doing so, he became the first person to reach the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, the ocean's deepest point, since 1960 and the first person in history to do so as a solo pilot. “I knew when I got to the bottom and looked out that window,” he says, “I was going to see something that nobody had seen before.”

He was right. It had been 52 years since the only other manned expedition, led by Don Walsh, a U.S. Navy lieutenant, and Jacques Piccard, a Swiss engineer, had touched down on the seafloor of the Mariana Trench in the bathyscaphe Trieste, filled with 130,000 liters of gasoline. The Trieste descended slowly, taking five hours to reach bottom and, when it landed, it unsettled such large clouds of silt that Walsh and Piccard’s views were obscured for the full twenty minutes they were there. “It was like looking into a bowl of milk,” says Walsh. They couldn’t see a thing.

It took more than fifty years for someone to attempt to return to that depth, nearly seven miles beneath the surface, and to do so in pursuit of scientific objectives. For Cameron, it all started when he was just a small boy. Even as he made a name for himself in Hollywood by writing, directing and producing the industry’s top-grossing movies in history, he sought to combine his two great passions—diving and filmmaking—by selecting topics and stories that allowed him to be near – or in – the ocean. As a result, many of his films have broken new ground in underwater cinematography, beginning with The Abyss in 1989.

Before the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER was built, there were no manned submersibles capable of reaching and conducting research at full ocean depth. Unphased by the challenge of engineering such a vehicle from scratch, Cameron recruited a diverse team of engineers, scientists and divers from all walks of life to co-design and build a scientific platform capable of exploring, conducting research and filming the ocean’s deepest places. “From the start, Jim [Cameron] made it clear that he did not want a conventional submersible,” said Ron Allum, a longtime collaborator and the submersible’s co-designer. The sub they built did not disappoint. The DEEPSEA CHALLENGER defied conventions and, in doing so, devised solutions to deep-ocean engineering challenges the oceans community is now incorporating and from which it's learning.

Unlike most submersibles, the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER is oriented vertically in the water, rather than horizontally, like a 24 foot long vertical torpedo. Moreover, the majority of the sub’s mass is made up of a specially-formulated “syntactic foam," a material made up of millions of hollow glass balls held together with epoxy resin, a sophisticated glue. Although syntactic foam is commonly used for submersibles, no existing formula proved to be able to withstand the crushing pressure of 16,000 pounds per square inch at full-ocean depth.

Working in his makeshift lab at home in Sydney, Ron Allum began tinkering with foam formulas, combining custom mixtures of glass balls and epoxy resin using a souped-up KitchenAid mixer. After 18 months of experimenting and testing, he perfected the recipe. “Ron will figure out solutions that are so off-the-wall when you first hear them,” Cameron told Popular Science. “Then they slowly reveal their brilliance and their elegance as you get into them.”

The foam, dubbed Iso-Float™, makes up 70 percent of the entire DEEPSEA CHALLENGER. It has double the strength of any pre-existing product; it’s both the submersible’s floating device and its structural core. Among the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER's other features are high-definition cameras, lighting, scientific sampling equipment, and twelve thrusters that allowed Cameron, the sub’s pilot, to nimbly maneuver the sub from within a cramped, custom-cast steel sphere.

It was from within this sphere that Cameron finally fulfilled his childhood dream of seeing the bottom of the Challenger Deep with his own eyes on March 26, 2012, making history as he did so. During the course of his six hour and forty minute dive, Cameron explored sections of the Mariana Trench’s 1,500 mile-long expanse, collecting samples that have since identified, to-date, 68 new species and collecting footage of unprecedentedly high quality.

Cameron described the experience exploring the Challenger Deep as otherworldly, something akin to being in a lunar environment. As the first manned scientific voyage there in more than half a century, his greatest hope, and that of his team, is that the expedition’s engineering and scientific advances make it easier for more people to return again soon. There is still an enormous amount left to see – and to learn.

CHAPTER THREE

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CHAPTER THREE

SKY HIGH

GULFSTREAM G650

In 2003, Preston Henne and the other executives at the Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation pondered a billion-dollar decision. For the first time since the early 1960s, the company in the business of building private jets considered doing so from scratch. A “clean-sheet design,” in industry parlance, with Henne holding the pen.

But before any drawing could take place, they held the world’s most valuable focus group, gathering 75 Gulfstream owners from 70 different countries at their headquarters in Savannah, Ga. Meeting twice a year for three days at a time, this discreet gathering of private jet setters developed something between a blueprint and a wish list for what Bloomberg TV would eventually call “the holy grail of private jets.”

In early designs, Gulfstream sought to reimagine what the experience aboard a private jet could be. "The first sketch we did was of a cup holder and a single window," says Henne, now retired, but then Gulfstream’s senior vice president of programs, engineering and test. "That simple drawing led to an aircraft interior where form follows function, where system functionality is guaranteed, where 16 supersized windows flood the cabin with light, and where intuitive controls give passengers the power to create a cabin tailored to their specific needs."

Five years and a billion dollars later, Henne and his team announced the Gulfstream G650, a luxury jet that also happens to fly faster and travel farther than any other civilian jet in the skies. From the clean-sheet design, Henne and his team turned a critical eye toward every facet of the build, crafting the world’s highest-performing jet from fewer than half the parts used in the previous model, abandoning certain Gulfstream traditions while improving upon others.

In perhaps the starkest departure, they opted against Gulfstream’s customary circular fuselage for a wider, oval design to accommodate more space in the cabin—one of the primary requests on the focus group’s wish list. But for more light, they expanded what were already the biggest windows in the skies, measuring 16 percent larger than any of Gulfstream’s previous jets. “Next-level windows have been our signature since we introduced the Gulfstream back in 1958,” says Steve Cass, Gulfstream’s vice president of technical marketing and communications.

Meanwhile, for more than 50 years, Gulfstream jets have been powered by Rolls-Royce engines, a feature that hasn’t changed for the G650—but has been taken to new heights. “The [Rolls-Royce] BR725 engines are among the lightest on earth, which allows the Gulfstream to take off from any size runway, with the least amount of noise,” Cass said.

Unsurprisingly, when defying gravity, weight matters. The lightweight engines help the G650, like its predecessors, reach a cruising altitude of more than 50,000 feet, well above commercial air traffic and any bad weather that might otherwise get in the way. They also help it fly faster for longer and set speed records, like it did in March 2014, when it flew from New York to Mumbai in a record-breaking 13 hours and 49 minutes.

But even as the G650’s passengers spend more time in higher altitudes, where the air thins out and nausea can set in, Henne’s team made sure its cabin remains at ease.

“The Gulfstream developers came up with a system that reduces pressurization,” says Cass. “When you’re flying at 40,000 feet, the depressurization system makes it feel like you’re only at 3,000 feet. That’s about a 50 percent reduction versus what you have in a commercial airliner.”

Despite the G650’s $65 million price tag, the company quickly sold 200 planes to wealthy patrons like Nike CEO Phil Knight and corporate clients like Walmart, developing an exclusive four-year waiting list made up of the type of people not used to waiting. The aviation industry had never seen anything like it. “This is an entirely new kind of aircraft,” says Dan Jennings, CEO of The Private Jet Company, which specializes in the buying and selling of corporate planes.

But for Henne, elevating the craft of the private jet simply made sense.

"An aircraft that goes farther and faster deserves a cabin that is bigger and better," he says. "So that's what we did."

CHAPTER FOUR

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CHAPTER FOUR

TERRAIN

BLOODHOUND SSC

Rarely are there surprises in the flatlands of South Africa’s Hakskeen Pan. In all directions, the horizon cleanly divides the brown of the dried-up lakebed from the blue expanse of the desert sky. Occasionally, the reliably binary landscape is treated with smatterings of white clouds.

But in early 2013, the barren canvas was peppered with 317 men and women in orange jumpsuits, deliberately clearing rocks from a 10-square-mile stretch of land. The work of these local villagers from the Northern Cape will soon welcome an unlikely interruption to the placid desert scene—a streaking blue supersonic car—and even a single missed rock could spoil the $79 million mission to shatter the world’s land speed record.

“When you are going as far into the unknown as we are,” says Roger Ayers, chief of aerodynamics for the Bloodhound SSC, “you are bound to get surprises.”

***

In 1991, Ayers, now 81, was a retired aerodynamicist working as a volunteer researcher at a motorsport and aviation Brooklands Museum in England. He had found himself at the offices of the man who’d designed the Bluebird CN7, which set the land speed record in 1963, speaking to Richard Noble, a Scottish entrepreneur who’d set the record himself twenty years later.

Ayers happened to mention that he’d spent much of his career perfecting the Bloodhound anti-aircraft missile, a biographical detail that was not lost on Noble, who had his sights set on reclaiming the record; doing so, however, would require not only engines, but military-grade rocket power.

“His powers of persuasion ensured that my retirement was over,” Ayers recalls. “We set the supersonic record in October 1997.”

Seventeen years later, they’re at it again. The 1997 Thrust SSC—the SSC stands for supersonic car—accomplished its goal, becoming the only land vehicle to ever break the sound barrier and setting the 763 mph record that still stands today. But it had been hacked together with spare parts. “We were using engines that were 30 years old,” Noble says. “The main processor came from a derelict tank.

"We thought we'd earned the right to do this properly with the right technology."

Along with Andy Green, the driver of the Thrust SSC, Ayers and Noble grew ambitious—even by their standards. The Bloodhound SSC, named for Ayers’s missile, would be built to travel 1,000 mph. “This isn’t about going slightly faster than the previous record,” says Green, a retired member of the Royal Air Force. “This is about going to the absolute limit of modern technology.”

It was that outsized ambition that helped them convince the British government to donate a Rolls-Royce EJ200 engine, originally fitted for the Ministry of Defense’s Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets. Combined with the power of a Formula 1 engine, one of these lightweight engines will take the Bloodhound to about 350 mph. With the flick of a trigger on a steering wheel cast exactly to his grip, Green will then activate rocket propulsion, provided by a Norwegian company that helps send Europeans into space.

Because no car has ever gone a thousand miles per hour, it’s not obvious what will happen when one does. But between past experience and scores of complex simulations, a picture begins to emerge.

At 650 mph, cars experience what’s known as front-lift, unwisely beginning to take flight. Ayers and his team carefully designed the Bloodhound by slightly altering a NASA-approved shape to prevent too much lift as Green accelerates.

At 700 mph, the rims on a car’s tires bear such extreme G-forces that, according to a report in Ars Technica, Goodyear allegedly recommended even its most advanced tires not exceed the speed. So the Bloodhound team forged four 200-pound aluminum wheels, which have the added benefit of being both lighter and stronger than traditional tires.

By 763 mph—the Thrust’s land speed record—the car will have broken the sound barrier.

Beyond that, the Bloodhound enters the unknown.

“Have I thought about the various things that could go wrong?” Green asks, “Yes. Do I lie around worrying about them? No. I lie around wondering what else we can do to mitigate all the various things so I don't have to lie around worrying about the consequences.”

“I think the land speed record is one of the few remaining genuine adventures,” he adds.

Green considers his work on the Bloodhound his “holiday job,” bringing a necessary dose of excitement to a life after military service. For Ayers, it’s become his retirement. Meanwhile, it’s the culmination of a lifelong obsession for Noble, who started chasing the land speed record in 1977 when he sold his car to develop an early version of the Thrust.

In less than a year, the trio, accompanied by a much larger crew, will touch down on a South African runway. They’ll step into an ordinary car and drive to the Hakskeen Pan, that blue and brown strip of land between Namibia and Botswana, where they’ll discover a different sort of runway, carefully stripped of any stray stones. After 17 years of planning, Green will then climb into the driver’s seat of a different sort of car—with Ayers, Noble and the rest of the world watching—and press his foot on the gas.