From space to the abyss, double record for astronaut Kathy Sullivan

Double record for NASA astronaut Kathy Sullivan: after being the first American woman to face a spacewalk in October 1984, she became the first woman to reach the deepest point of the oceans, in Fossa delle Marianne, going down up to 11 kilometers with a small submarine.

The astronaut reached the point called Challenger Deep in the Pacific Ocean aboard the two-seater submersible Limiting Factor, with the millionaire Victor Bishop who had visited that point twice already. The first thing the two did as soon as they returned to the surface was to call astronauts on the International Space Station.

"As an oceanographer and astronaut - Sullivan said - this was a unique day in life: seeing the lunar landscape of the Challenger Deep and then confronting my colleagues at the Space Station on our extraordinary internal and external space".

Sullivan and Bishop spent about 10 hours aboard the submarine, built to withstand the enormous pressure of more than 1.2 tons per square centimeter. It took four hours to go down to the bottom, where the two stayed for about an hour and a half, and another four to go up.

In 1978 Sullivan was one of the first women selected in the NASA astronaut corps and over 15 years she faced three space missions, including the one that brought the Hubble space telescope into orbit; on October 11, 1984 she was the first American woman to face a spacewalk during a mission with the Shuttle Challenger. Subsequently she dedicated herself to oceanography, working for the American agency for the atmosphere and the oceans (Noaa), in 1993 as respondent of the research and from 2014 to 2017 as chief administrator.