Original subtitles

On Earth's highest peak, Explorers Club members Edmund Hillary

and Tenzing Norgay are either on the brink of making history

or falling through its cracks...

[grunting and screaming]

[Josh] ...while at Earth's lowest point,

an ocean abyss called Challenger Deep...

Oh, so close!

[Josh] ...Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard pray they won't be crushed

by the deep sea's colossal pressure.

[sighs]

We're still alive.

[Josh] And Joe Kittinger takes one giant leap from the edge of space.

Every job has its highs and lows, but members

of the Explorers Club have taken both to the extreme.

[Joe screaming]

[Josh] Welcome to the world-famous Explorers Club.

For over 100 years, this has been a gathering place for trailblazers.

The people who dare to venture higher,

further and faster.

As a member of this exclusive club, I'm bringing

one-of-a-kind access to its archives...

This is incredible.

[Josh] ...artifacts...

Oh, my word!

[Josh] ...and my fellow explorers.

This is actual lunar dust.

Unbelievable!

[Josh] The expeditions planned here have tested

the boundaries of human possibility.

Its flag has flown on death-defying voyages

into the unknown that forever changed our world.

These are the greatest adventures of all time.

These are...

Tales from the Explorers Club.

The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, once observed,

the best things are placed between extremes.

Here, it's just the opposite.

Extremes are what this place is all about, pushing limits,

breaking records and redrawing maps.

Two Explorers Club members made it their mission to climb

to where no one in history had gone before.

Ed Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, two men who would rise above the rest,

all the way to the highest point on Earth.

[wind whooshing]

Mount Everest is the highest peak in the Himalayas,

straddling the border between China and Nepal.

The summit rises to 29,035 feet. Named after 19th century

British surveyor, George Everest,

but the Nepalese call it Sagarmatha, goddess of the sky.

To them, the peak is the sacred home of their goddess's spirit.

If Everest's thin air doesn't kill you,

the freezing temperatures will.

Winds blow as strong as a hurricane and avalanches

crash down the slopes each day.

How does one find perspective on extreme places like Mount Everest,

the kind of destination few have reached?

Lucky for me, in my search for answers, I'm an Explorers Club member.

I have access to the club, its vast archives and the most irreplaceable

resource of all, my fellow members.

Case in point, former Disney Imagineer and my good friend, Joe Rohde.

He ventured to the Himalayas, researching one of his signature

thrill rides, Expedition Everest.

How do locals think of these mountains?

Is it a reverence?

Is it a fear? Is it a respect?

There's a quality of reverence, of course.

They are revered.

It's a problem at the beginning, finding Sherpas

or Tibetans who would go on these mountains because

they were part of that sacred, untouched realm.

-Right. -And then, of course, they're manifestly dangerous.

[Josh] Yeah.

So when somebody does go and something bad happens,

everyone's like, "See, I told you."

Right, or they simply never come back.

[Joe] Yeah.

[wind whooshing]

[Josh] In 1953, Everest remains unconquered,

but with a contingent of Nepalese Sherpas at their side,

a plucky troop of British explorers have assembled for a summit attempt.

Without the Sherpas' experience and expertise,

the expedition would be impossible.

The team's leader, Colonel John Hunt, is efficient and tenacious.

No one wants to get on Hunt's wrong side,

since he will be choosing which pair among them

will make the historic summit assault.

No climber wants that chance more than a reserved,

yet resolute New Zealander named Edmund Hillary.

In the weeks of preparation setting up base camps,

Hillary has forged a strong bond

with the Sherpas' leader, Tenzing Norgay.

You get more pemmican?

Yes, plenty.

Oxygen?

Hmm, a little low.

Don't breathe so hard.

Norgay is such a critical part of this expedition.

First of all, he is personally incredibly experienced, right?

There was a Swiss expedition the year before

and he almost was at the summit.

He's been within 800 feet of the top of this mountain.

He's already been higher than anybody in the world.

[Edmund] It looks like a storm is brewing.

It is all goddess's wish, sir.

[Josh] Their bond goes far beyond climbing stories and small talk.

Their partnership was forged, risking their lives together on Everest.

Early in the expedition, Hillary had plunged down a deep crevasse,

but Norgay alertly snagged Hillary's trailing rope,

preventing a fatal fall, then lifted him to safety.

Their friendship and professionalism make a lasting impression

on 20-year-old Kancha Sherpa, destined to become the last

surviving member of the expedition.

During a recent trip I made to Everest, he invited me to his teahouse.

There, I sought his first-hand perspective on just what made Hillary

and Norgay such a special team.

His stories of their bond only heightened my reverence for the duo.

When the Sherpas would get together and talk about Hillary,

did you have confidence in him?

[Kancha speaking in foreign language]

At any point during the expedition, did you ever think about,

"This is crazy," you know, this...

you know, "I should get out of here"?

[Kancha speaking in foreign language]

So, why did you stay?

[Kancha speaking in foreign language]

Right, you have to work.

[chuckles]

[Josh] To this moment in 1953, Everest has repulsed

ten expeditions and killed 19 mountaineers.

The most renowned was Englishman, George Mallory.

In 1924, he and another climber, Sandy Irvine,

were last seen high on the peak before being

swallowed up by a thick layer of clouds.

They disappeared without a trace.

Hillary and Norgay are well aware of the doomed footsteps

that they're following in, but it does not deter them.

On May 21, Hillary, Norgay and the rest of the climbing party

reached their final staging area 3,000 feet below the summit.

On extreme expeditions like this, the time honored-practice

is for the leader to wait until late in the ascent

to select his summit assault team,

based on each climber's performance.

[Edmund] We are here.

Give me a moment.

[Josh] Colonel Hunt has narrowed the field to two teams.

One is Hillary and Norgay, the other, Tom Bordelon, a physicist,

and Charles Evans, a brain surgeon.

[John] Congratulations.

Tom, Charlie.

[Josh] Hunt's choice, Bordelon and Evans.

Hillary and Norgay must stomach the disappointment,

but they're also on deck if their colleagues fail.

On May 26, Bordelon and Evans set off to make history.

The obstacles are many, but in this last push above 26,000 feet,

the deadliest is Everest's thin air.

Each breath the climbers take contains just one-third

of the oxygen found at sea level.

Every step is a Herculean effort.

It's like running on a treadmill, but breathing through a straw.

An oxygen-starved climber can experience dizziness, nausea and hallucinations,

make critical errors in judgment, and finally lose consciousness and die.

[breathing heavily]

You all right?

Never better.

[Josh] Bordelon and Evan's supplemental oxygen provides relief,

but only as long as their supply holds out.

At 1:00 p.m., they reach the elevation of 28,700 feet,

higher than any known climber before.

But Evans is spent and their oxygen will never last if they continue.

Reluctantly, they retreat.

Hours later, at the expedition's base camp,

a colleague snaps this picture.

They were 330 feet from immortality,

but Everest had left them exhausted and defeated.

Tom Bordelon always regretted his decision to turn back,

even though going on would have meant certain death.

That may not make sense to many people, but it's the kind of thinking

members of this club would understand.

[Josh] Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay

are about to put that mindset to the ultimate test.

The date is May 28, 1953, two days after Bordelon

and Evans came so close to making history.

It is now Hillary and Norgay's turn.

Their strategy is to climb as high as they can to a point

where they can set up camp for the night,

then set out again with fresh legs at dawn.

27,900 feet up, they sleep higher than

any known humans have slept before.

The temperature drops to 30 degrees below zero.

In the morning, Hillary finds his boots have frozen solid.

It takes him an hour to thaw them.

Any number of variables can derail them at this point,

weather, equipment failure or an untimely slip leading to catastrophic injury.

The odds of failure far outweigh the odds of success.

Still, the weather has cleared.

The day seems perfect for their assault on the summit.

But as Hillary and Norgay climb to a spot just below it,

Everest throws up one final, seemingly insurmountable obstacle.

A nearly vertical 40-foot wall of rock and ice.

Retreat seems the only option, but never bet against two obsessed explorers

ready to risk everything now that success is tantalizingly close.

The now-famous cliff face towers over

Hillary and Norgay like a granite guardian, refusing to let them pass.

Scaling a rock like this is hard enough.

Imagine trying it at the crushing altitude of your last airline flight.

Studying the challenge, Hillary and Norgay spot a solution.

There's a jagged crack running the length of the step,

with a rock pillar on one side and a ridge of ice on the other,

and a space just big enough for one climber.

This is the final barrier to overcome.

There are no other routes.

God only knows what's racing through Hillary's mind at this moment.

But I suspect it's the quote for which he's most famous.

"It's not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves."

[screaming]

Many things are named after Edmund Hillary,

including an undersea canyon near Antarctica and a mountain range on Pluto.

But nothing bearing his name carries more mystique than

the 40-foot cliff face that confronted him just short of Mount Everest's summit.

The name it was given is as understated as the man

who first dared to climb it, the Hillary Step.

At the end of your journey, you beat the hell out of yourself, you know.

[Josh] Right.

And now, you're slogging and slogging and slogging to get up there.

And then there's a 40-foot wall.

So you gotta chimney up into it, it's like a crevice, you know.

You're in there...

It's unimaginably exhausting to do this.

And if you slip and fall, it's a very, very, very long way to go.

Right!

[Josh] Some explorers become immortal by traveling thousands of miles.

This 40-foot climb at the top of the world

will make Edmund Hillary a legend.

He wedges himself in the crack between the rock

and ice and painstakingly propels himself upward inch by inch.

[breathing heavily]

He makes it to the top of the step and pulls up Norgay with his trailing rope.

It's 11:30 a.m. when they realize there's nowhere else to climb.

They're standing on the highest spot on earth.

After the moment sinks in, Hillary's thoughts turn to George Mallory.

He searches for any signs of him but finds nothing.

Mallory's frozen remains will eventually be discovered

in 1999, 2,000 feet below the summit.

After 15 minutes atop Everest, Norgay leaves an offering to the goddess he believes

resides in the mountain, a chocolate bar, biscuits and candy.

Minutes later, Hillary snaps Norgay's picture for posterity.

But Hillary wouldn't let Norgay take his picture.

Pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Hillary.

He wasn't in it for the glory.

The deed itself was enough.

It takes the climbers four hours to reach their base camp 3,000 feet

below, where the expedition's leader,

John Hunt, sends word of their triumph.

[John] They've done it.

[Josh] It will travel from Everest to a Nepalese radio post,

then relayed to London.

Britain's new queen, Elizabeth II, is elated to receive the news

on the eve of her coronation.

The next day, she shares the news with the world.

The achievement is her favorite coronation gift.

Since their historic first, more than 6,000 climbers

have reached Everest's summit and more than 200 have died trying.

Explorers Club members have carried 24 different club flags to the top.

Why people climb Everest only they can say.

But no one expressed his reason better than George Mallory,

"because it's there."

Seven years after Hillary and Norgay proved they could stand

on top of the world, two other members of the Explorers Club

resolved to answer that age-old question made famous by the limbo.

"How low can you go?"

The answer could only be found in one place, an undersea trench

200 miles southwest of Guam, the deepest known place on earth.

[Josh] Named after the 19th century British survey ship

that first recorded its depth, Challenger Deep lies at the southern end

of the Mariana Trench, Earth's deepest oceanic abyss.

The bottom of Challenger Deep is nearly seven miles

below the Pacific Ocean's surface.

If Mount Everest base rested on the seabed,

its summit would still be 7,000 feet underwater.

Who in their right mind would try to venture to such a place?

The answer is this man, Lieutenant Don Walsh.

The year is 1960.

The United States Navy has embarked on a bold new

program of undersea exploration.

The top brass is resolved to send a manned mission to Challenger Deep.

Walsh is a submarine commander, handpicked for the assignment.

His partners are two Swiss civilians, oceanographer,

Jacques Piccard, and his physicist father, Auguste.

They've been on the leading edge of deep sea research for several years.

The three men are at an inflection point

many Explorers Club members face.

After crunching the numbers, exhaustive planning and painstakingly

detailed engineering, they must decide whether to trust

their preparation, their collaborators and ultimately themselves.

Want to see our latest figures, Don?

Yes, sir.

I'll take a look.

[Josh] When you're venturing to where no human has traveled before,

there's always a leap of faith and lives hang in the balance.

Their objective and Auguste's confidence are Herculean.

Now there's no better place to hear tales of daring missions

into the unknown than the Explorers Club bar,

and no better person to gain some insider knowledge on the dangers

of Challenger Deep than someone who's personally made the trip,

Explorers Club President Richard Garriott.

What's the biggest danger they're facing?

Oh, pressure.

At that depth, the pressure per square inch is something like 1,000 times

the pressure we naturally feel here at approximately sea level,

on the surface of the earth.

That's the weight of, you know, 50 jumbo jets.

To have made that first dive

when the engineering and safety aspects of the...

the doability of this was still

so completely unknown, I think it was truly heroic.

[speaking in foreign language]

I don't want to die, sir.

[Josh] The Navy's answer is the one-of-a-kind

submersible designed by Auguste, theTrieste.

Named after the Italian city in which it is constructed,

theTrieste is essentially an undersea balloon that goes down instead of up.

The two-man crew occupies a six-foot steel sphere

with walls five-inches thick, thick enough, they hope,

to withstand the deep sea's immense pressure.

Above the sphere is a 58-foot chamber,

holding 34,000 gallons of aviation fuel.

Lighter than water, it keeps the craft afloat.

To descend, the crew floods air tanks with seawater.

To rise, they release tons of iron pellets.

Up to the point that they're going to make

this dive, how deep had Triestegone?

Something like 23,000 feet.

Okay.

And so, it still had another 13,000 feet or so to be tested to this full ocean depth.

Right, which is not insignificant.

No, that's another, you know, 400-500 atmospheres of pressure.

[Josh] Yeah.

So it's an enormous amount of additional pressure.

Yeah. Right around now is when I would ask the Navy

for a conveniently-timed shore leave.

But Don and Jacques, who'll be manning the Trieste,

were more than ready to take this insane plunge.

[Josh] Go time is January 23, 1960.

Jacques knows that surviving the expedition depends

entirely on his father's invention.

TheTrieste dives at 8:23 a.m.

At 1,500 feet, Walsh and Piccard see

the last traces of sunlight vanish and the sea becomes inky black.

Down they go, dropping 200 feet per minute, deeper and deeper.

10,000 feet, 15,000, 20,000.

At 23,000 feet, they break their own diving record,

entering depths never before visited by humans.

At 29,500 feet, Walsh and Piccard sense the Mariana

Trench's steep walls rising around them.

They feel the deep sea's immense pressure pushing on their tiny sphere.

Then at 32,400 feet.

[muffled booming]

In a flash, theTrieste's mission is on the brink of disaster.

This alien world might crush the two men in a millisecond.

[Josh] Put yourself in the shoes of Explorers Club members,

Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard, on January 23, 1960.

They were 32,000 feet under the Pacific Ocean, on the brink of becoming

the first humans to reach the deepest point on our planet.

But their pioneering submersible was rocked by a sudden noise.

If the structure is compromised,

they might soon be crushed by the deep sea's insanely high pressure.

So, would you scrub the mission or go for it?

Here at the Explorers Club, you probably know the answer.

[Josh] Just one unforeseen weak spot at this depth

will only be compromised further,

as Walsh and Piccard take theTrieste deeper.

They know if their sphere cracks at this unprecedented depth,

it will trigger an explosive change in pressure that will vaporize them.

At some significant depth, they actually did hear a very loud bang associated

with the breaking of a Plexiglas outer layer of one of their windows.

Without getting too grisly here,

what happens if the sub hull fails?

Well, the good-bad news if the hull fails is that it will implode so quickly

that none of the crew would even know that anything had happened.

In fact, there's an adage in submersibles where you go,

if you hear something go bang, that's fine,

because on the bang that would kill you, you won't hear it.

Right. It's that fast?

-It's that fast. -Wow!

[breathing heavily]

We're so close!

We're still alive.

[breathing heavily]

We dive.

Yeah.

[Josh] Walsh and Piccard decide to roll the dice and continue their descent.

Gutsy call, considering they're still a mile

from the bottom of Challenger Deep.

TheTrieste's groaning persists, but four hours and 38 minutes

after their dive began, the two men touch down

on the seafloor, seven miles below the surface.

There are no historic words, nothing comparable to "The eagle has landed."

[both laughing]

[Josh] But what Walsh and Piccard have achieved

is no less impressive than putting a man on the moon.

One for the books.

[Josh] Life Magazine has installed a camera in the sphere,

and Walsh and Piccard take a selfie.

Okay, it looks more like a police mugshot than a moment of great achievement.

But the grim expression speak to the fact that

they still have no idea if they're coming home alive.

They stay on the bottom only 20 minutes.

But during that brief time, they make a shocking discovery,

something no one expected them to find.

What is that?

[Josh] Through their porthole, they see a foot-long flatfish

browsing in the silt, as well as a large red shrimp.

That was the first life that had ever been even theorized at that depth.

People didn't believe that life could live at such a high pressure.

Isn't that incredible?

Seven miles down and there's life.

There's life everywhere.

-Everywhere there's water, there's life. -[Josh] Yeah.

In fact, there is no place on Earth we have found water

that we did not also now find life.

[Josh] Walsh and Piccard's ascent takes just over three hours.

The sheer audacity of their expedition is evident,

in that it will be 52 years before another explorer ventures to the bottom

of Challenger Deep. The explorer is club member

and renowned film director, James Cameron.

Since Cameron's dive, other Explorers Club members have followed,

including a familiar face from the club bar, President Richard Garriott.

To date, at least 27 people have visited Challenger Deep.

But in the world of exploration, the spotlight shines brightest

on the daring who make the journey first.

The members of this club have dived as deep as you can dive

and climbed as high as you can climb.

But there's up and then there's way, way up.

I'm talking about the threshold of space,

the highest point above the Earth where you haven't quite kissed gravity goodbye.

The same year that Walsh and Piccard made history,

a guy named Joe risked his life flying to that spot in a balloon.

Then he did something even crazier, he jumped.

[Josh] The date, August 15, 1960.

At Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, Explorers Club member,

Joe Kittinger, prepares for a mission

so dangerous it defies comprehension.

Hey, Joe, looking good.

Roger that, doc.

So, this is it, huh?

This is it.

Hmm.

You sure it's going to hold up?

It should hold.

[Joe] It should.

It'll hold.

[Josh] Kittinger is the top test pilot of Project Excelsior,

a research study for America's fledgling space program.

Its goal is to see if pressure suits can protect astronauts

from the harsh environment of space, and if a man can safely eject

from a spacecraft at high altitudes.

Joe isn't a household name like John Glenn or Neil Armstrong,

but what he's about to do will pave the way

for the future of America's space program.

How high are we going again?

Target altitude is 102,800 feet.

No pressure.

Yeah, literally no pressure.

[Josh] The plan is to ascend 19 miles to the edge of space,

then attempt history's longest freefall parachute jump.

Project Excelsior's head, Dr. John Stapp, knows he's asking a lot of Joe,

but nothing crazier than he's asked of himself.

In the 1950s, Stapp volunteered

for a series of rocket sled trials, testing pilot safety equipment.

In 29 runs, he broke his ribs, tailbone and wrist.

Stapp was the kind of guy that would have scoffed at crash test dummies.

His most insane ride came in 1954 when he accelerated

to 632 miles per hour, then stopped in barely over one second.

He endured more than 46 Gs, the force equal to a driver slamming into a brick wall

at 120 miles per hour.

The ride burst every blood vessel in Stapp's eyes, leaving him temporarily blind.

Stapp is a hard act to follow, but Joe's mission will take extreme to a cosmic new level.

At a staging area in the New Mexico desert, Joe suits up with layer

after layer of warm clothing, because the temperature at his destination altitude

of 102,000 feet will be 94 degrees below zero.

He'll be breathing supplemental oxygen the entire flight because

I just like Everest, there's not enough

of it in the thin air to keep you alive.

At Joe's target altitude, the air pressure is roughly

equivalent to the surface of Mars.

His problem is the opposite of Walsh and Piccard's.

The higher he goes there won't be too much pressure, but too little.

This means that equally crucial to Joe's survival is his pressure suit,

which contains multiple inflatable bladders

that will press tightly around his body,

compensating for the near-zero air pressure at high altitude.

Above 50,000 feet, there is so little pressure that without protection,

your blood circulation will slow to a crawl

and your body will swell up like a balloon.

You won't explode, at least the experts say you won't,

but you will be in excruciating pain

before you eventually pass out and die.

Where do I sign up?

[Josh] Joe is relying on his pressure suit to prevent that grisly fate.

To learn more about the extreme hazards of Kittinger's leap,

I'm meeting a man who has taken the ultimate walk at altitude,

a spacewalk that is, club member and former astronaut, Mike Massimino.

And when we say pressure suit, like, how...

what is this thing doing?

We need some pressure around our bodies to exist.

And the altitude he's at, there's like no pressure.

Yeah, so where he was, he was almost at the vacuum.

There was very little pressure.

There was no way he could survive without a pressure suit,

like the spacesuit that I wore,

-it was pressurized with oxygen. -Right.

[Mike] And there was a regulator

that would keep you at the right pressures.

-[Josh] Right. -So in his case, I think what they used was bladders.

Like...

like actual pressure things pushing against him.

Yeah, to try to maintain the pressure on the skin...

-Wow. -...to keep him alive.

Crazy.

-Absolutely insane. -Yeah.

I mean, you're an astronaut, so I use you as the, as the gauge for this.

[Mike] Yeah.

-[Josh] Would you do this? -No, I would not.

[Josh] At 5:29 in the morning, Joe Kittinger is up, up and away.

It will take 90 minutes to reach his target altitude.

All goes well until Joe hits 43,000 feet.

[grunting]

His pressure suit is failing him.

His right glove has not inflated.

Inside, his hand is swelling grotesquely.

And he knows that as he rises through the stratosphere,

the problem will only get worse.

But Joe also knows, if he alerts his boss, Colonel Stapp,

on the radio, he'll abort the mission.

[groaning]

The idea of flying a balloon to the edge of space sounds like fantasy.

But in 1960, Explorers Club member,

Joe Kittinger, was doing it for real.

It is hard to comprehend just how high he was going.

To put it in perspective, the highest altitude of the Boeing 707,

America's first jet airliner, was 45,000 feet.

1960s newest jet fighter, the F-4 Phantom, topped out at 56,000 feet.

At that altitude, Joe was barely halfway to his objective.

[Josh] An hour and a half after lift-off,

now in a near vacuum, Joe has lost all feeling in his swollen right hand,

but he finally reaches his goal, 102,800 feet.

The black canopy of space is just above him.

After completing a 46-step checklist,

he switches on the gondola's movie cameras,

then positions himself at the open hatch.

A placard is secured there that says it all,

"This is the highest step in the world."

Joe does one final thing that's not on his checklist.

He utters a prayer.

Lord, take care of me now.

I've sky-dived, but it would take an electric cattle prod

to make me jump from that height.

Joe Kittinger required no such nudge that day.

He walked the fine line between bravery and insanity simply

because it was what his country asked him to do.

[breathing heavily]

Okay. So...

so he takes the leap.

How fast does he fall?

He ends up going 614 miles an hour.

Sorry, he's falling 614 miles an hour?

Can you imagine?

It's almost like, he almost broke the sound barrier doing it, falling.

You know, he's not in an airplane...

-Right. -...or a spaceship.

He's just out there flying.

[Joe groans]

[Josh] Joe has no sense of his insane speed.

Falling in a virtual vacuum, there's no flutter

to the fabric of his pressure suit.

[breathing heavily]

[Josh] His free fall seems endless.

Two minutes pass, then three, then four.

After four minutes and 36 seconds, slowed at last by friction

from the increasingly heavier air, Joe's 28-foot main

parachute deploys at 14,000 feet,

and history's highest and fastest freefall is in the books.

His swollen hand soon returns to normal size and he regains its full use.

His jump proves that pilots and astronauts can eject

without injury at high altitudes and advances

the development of safety equipment that will save countless lives.

Kittinger's record leap will stand unchallenged until 2012,

when at the age of 84, he helps to break it.

At New Mexico's Roswell Airport,

he acts as a mission consultant for an Austrian

skydiver named, Felix Baumgartner.

Baumgartner begins parachute jumping in his teens,

before honing his skills in the Austrian military.

Eventually, he adds BASE jumping to his repertoire,

setting several world records along the way.

To say Baumgartner feels at home hurtling

through the atmosphere is an understatement.

But nothing compares to the feat he has planned next.

Baumgartner will jump from an altitude of 128,000 feet,

26,000 feet higher than Kittinger's leap in 1960.

Joe is his primary radio contact.

[Kittinger speaking on radio]

[Josh] His presence lends a touch of retro to a showcase of 21st century high-tech.

Decades after Kittinger's jump, Baumgartner has access

to creature comforts not available in Joe's time.

The capsule is fully climate-controlled.

Baumgartner's suit provides him with pure oxygen and utilizes composite

materials to maintain a steady pressure on the descent.

[Joe Kittinger] All right, stand up on the exterior step,

keep your head down and our guardian angel will take care of you.

[Felix speaking]

[Josh] Everything seems to be going according to plan.

But then, in the first minute of the jump, Baumgartner

begins tumbling out of control.

He is now in danger of blacking out.

[Kittinger speaking on radio]

[Felix speaking]

[Felix breathing heavily]

To advance cutting-edge scientific research,

Discovery has pledged nearly $2 million to fund Explorers Club expeditions.

Dr. Nina Lanza is heading one such mission as part

of the ongoing search for signs of life on Mars.

Her destination is the Haughton crater in Northern Canada

where a comet or an asteroid crashed

into the Earth 23 million years ago.

The 14-mile wide hole is the only terrestrial impact

crater in such a frigid environment.

Sitting at the lowest point in the Arctic,

it's the closest thing to Mars on Earth.

Haughton Crater is the ideal place for Dr. Lanza

to test out an assortment of new aerial drones

and high-tech biosensing equipment.

If her state-of-the-art gear works there,

chances are it will work on Mars.

Her observations will further lay the foundations

in the search for life on the red planet and possibly accelerate

humanity's push toward extraterrestrial colonization.

[Josh] Daredevil Felix Baumgartner is close

to shattering Joe Kittinger's record.

But after things appear to be going smoothly,

he risks losing consciousness after entering into a violent spin.

[Kittinger speaking on radio]

[Josh] Baumgartner must alter his position on the fly,

no pun intended, to rectify the spin.

But in a freefall at such low air density,

the human body does not always respond as intended.

[Kittinger speaking on radio]

[Josh] Baumgartner stays conscious long enough

to reach denser air, closer to Earth.

There, he manipulates his body to increase air resistance

and regains control one minute and 23 seconds into his jump.

[announcer] Showing Felix in a stable descent.

[cheering and applause]

[Josh] Thanks to help in no small part from a guy named Joe.

[Kittinger speaking on radio]

[cheering and applause]

Some explorers go high, some go low.

But it wasn't until 2019 that one became the undisputed master of both.

Victor Vescovo has been to Everest's Summit

and to the bottom of Challenger Deep.

He doesn't just have an appetite for adventure, he has a hunger for it.

With every new expedition, he's making Explorers Club history.

[Victor] We're doing it because we're explorers, because we want to see,

we want to push the boundaries, we want to learn things

that haven't been learned before

and we want to do it together and bring it back and share it with other people.

[Josh] Vescovo aims to follow in his fellow club members' footsteps,

then go beyond them in ways made possible by modern science.

To retrace the voyage of theTrieste, Vescovo constructs

a new submersible loaded with ground-breaking technology.

He names itLimiting Factor.

Explorers Club archivist, Lacey Flint has a piece

ofLimiting Factor's structural frame that makes it tailor-made

for deep sea exploration.

Welcome to the Explorers Club archives.

[Josh] My favorite part of the club.

Lacey, what is this?

This is syntactic foam, Josh.

Okay. I thought it was syntactic foam.

I know you did.

For people who don't know what syntactic foam is...

This is actually the material that you use to build

underwater submarines, like the Limiting Factor.

And so, what is this material doing?

So it's actually really dense, really lightweight.

It's made of these tiny glass spheres that are hollow.

And this is what helps you float at the bottom of the ocean

while withstanding massive pressure.

So this is what makes trips to the bottom of the ocean possible?

It absolutely is.

-[Josh] Incredible. -Yeah.

-And it's so light. -Okay, put it down.

Okay.

[Josh] Limiting Factor's strength and mobility helped

make Vescovo's plunge into Challenger Deep the deepest solo dive ever,

35,853 feet,

besting James Cameron's record in 2012 by 66 feet.

Vescovo's dive to Challenger Deep is just part of the grander project

he's orchestrated, The Five Deeps Expedition,

an exploration of the deepest parts of the world's five oceans.

[Victor] I've always wanted to do something

that has never been done before.

No one has actually been to the bottom of the five oceans.

[Josh] Joining him on some of the dives are Explorers Club President,

Richard Garriott, astronaut Kathy Sullivan and Kelly Walsh,

whose father Don commanded theTrieste's historic dive six decades earlier.

During The Five Deeps, he and his crew discover

40 new species of aquatic life.

[Victor] This is now the deepest diving

operational submersible in the world,

and we just took it where no one's ever gone before.

So it's a great feeling.

[Josh] Vescovo hopes to expand our growing knowledge of the sea

with his next expedition, a dive to the bottom

of the Mid-American Trench off the west coast of Mexico.

No manned descent in the trench has ever been

attempted and no one has ever laid eyes on its deepest realms.

Victor Vescovo's triumphs are the Explorers Club's triumphs,

as are the feats of Edmund Hillary, Tenzing Norgay,

Jacques Piccard, Don Walsh and Joe Kittinger.

Explorers are driven to go to the blank spaces on maps,

enjoying the highs and enduring the lows along the way.