30,000 Leagues Undersea : True Tales of a Submariner and Deep Submergence Pilot

By Tom Vetter

Book Overview

Ever want something so much there is nothing you wouldn't do or give to get it? That happened to me. I wanted to be a Hydronaut, explorer of the ocean abyss.When I was a kid just old enough to consider the question, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" there were two U.S. space programs, both driven by the Cold War. NASA's sent men into orbit and for a time to the moon and back. Every kid alive then wanted to become an astronaut. But when I realized they'd never get out of orbit to live Hollywood space adventures on other planets in my lifetime, I wasn't one of them.But the U.S. Navy's "Inner Space" program was already exploring alien worlds. It regularly sent men into the abyss, a place much stranger and more hostile than the moon or Mars to explore and work. It, too, used science, cutting-edge technical innovations and clever improvisations to explore those hidden realms and thus come to understand the three-quarters of Earth undersea. The biggest difference between NASA and Navy was in the resources expended for mission success. NASA employed thousands of people and spent billions to conduct space missions. In contrast, for the dozens of deep submergence missions I later participated in, we had . . . me.I may be the only guy who ever set out as a boy to become a hydronaut and did. I had to plan for years, tailor my life, work way too hard, and damn-near die more than once to succeed. But as a hydronaut I DID enter alien worlds, encounter real aliens, make first discoveries and map regions never before explored. With one or two others, I went to places on Earth that no one before and no one else will ever journey. And it was my plans and my charts that took us there and brought us back.30,000 Leagues Undersea: True Tales of a Submariner and Deep Submergence Pilot, tells the story of how I did it, and all that happened down there.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1941160093
• ISBN13: 9781941160091
• Release Date: April 2015
• Publisher: Vetter Books, LLC, Tom
• Length: 500 Pages
• Weight: 2.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 13 years and up