Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [121]
It took us more than an hour to descend to the Titanic. We were not attached to the ship above us by a tether, but moved under our own power as we dropped through the darkness. I was on the right of the pilot, with my face pressed against the porthole-type window, straining to see as we made our way down. I caught sight of the eerie remains of the sunken ship, like a ghost rising through the hazy darkness. The Nautile’s pilot eased the sub forward until it hovered just above the Titanic’s bow. We were 12,500 feet below the surface. I grabbed a camera and started snapping pictures of what I thought was probably a place where passengers had once stood and looked out over the sea. The algae and other organisms covering the rusty bow gave it a strange whitish, surreal appearance, almost as though it were made of crusty gingerbread covered with frosting. We continued all the way down to the ocean floor. Color means nothing on the ocean’s bottom, since no sunlight ever makes it that far down. But in the lights from our submersible, I saw a sight almost as fascinating as the Titanic itself. Some pure white sea creatures that looked like a cross between a crab and a starfish were swimming all around the vessel. They had no eyes, which made sense to me, because there was no light to see anything by. In all my diving experience, I had never seen such unusual creatures.
The pilot maneuvered the submersible around the Titanic, searching for the items we hoped to raise. We were planning to float a fifteen-ton section of the Titanic’s hull to within 215 feet of the surface. We had six lift bags filled with diesel fuel, which we pulled to within 100 feet of the wreckage. Each of the bags was capable of lifting more than three tons of material. Diesel fuel does not compress under the water’s pressure, and is lighter than water, so ostensibly the lift bags would cause the Titanic’s hull to float. The Nautile’s pilot used the sub’s manipulator arms to connect the bags to the hull section with strong cables. But as we began to lift the hull, one of the cables connecting the lift bags snapped, and another would not release, causing the assembly to become unstable. We tried cutting the rope with a knife in the manipulator arm. But even though we cut the rope, nothing happened. One of the bags had somehow disengaged, so nothing we did was going to bring up the hull. The rough seas had caused the Titanic’s hull to sink into the ocean’s floor. We had already been down about nine hours, and still needed another hour to ascend to the surface. Although the mission itself was scrubbed, the experience for me was truly worthwhile. To have traveled to the moon, Earth’s new frontier, and to the ocean floor, Earth’s deepest frontier, in a span of less than thirty years, was an extraordinary pair of adventures.
IN 1998, I traveled to the North Pole on the Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker Sovetsky Soyuz, on a trip scheduled by Quark Adventures, organized by The Explorers Club, and headed by Mike McDowell. My longtime friend and ABC network news personality Hugh Downs, and his wife, Ruth, were also aboard. Hugh had a film crew on the ship for the ABC television program 20/20. I had asked Lois if she would like to accompany me to the North Pole, and she said, “No way, but you go and have a good time. Then you can come back and tell me all about it.” If Lois planned to be cold, she preferred to have skis attached to her feet. She didn’t relish the idea of spending a week on a Russian icebreaker. She did, however, find a camping store in Paris where she bought my French couture cold-weather red-orange mountaineering outfit. I felt very warm and quite fashionable—and later wore this same outfit for my “Final Frontiersman” photo shoot with photographer Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair.
We flew to Murmansk, Russia, and from there it