Deep freeze

"The Arctic doesn't wait for you," said Tang, 42, deputy director of the ship and equipment management center of the National Deep Sea Center of the Ministry of Natural Resources. "Your weather window moves. Your ice hole moves. Even your north disappears. Our job was to make sure the Jiaolong could still come home."

Since 2020, Tang has led the Jiaolong technical support team through nearly 300 maintenance and readiness missions and guided the team through 20 sea survey expeditions. Over his two-decade career, he has piloted or participated in more than 150 crewed dives, while the Jiaolong itself has completed nearly 450 dives.

Born in Suining, a landlocked city in Southwest China's Sichuan province, Tang began his journey with the submersible in 2006, when a notice at his university announced that China was recruiting its first batch of homegrown submersible pilots. At the time, the country's manned deep-sea program was still in its infancy and largely unknown to the public.

"This industry definitely involves risks, but I chose to give it a try, hoping to do something that the country urgently needs," Tang recalled.

What followed was repetitive and grueling training. Tang studied the fundamentals of ship design, hydraulics, mechanical and electronic systems, and the advanced materials used to build deep-sea submersibles, before undergoing rigorous physical conditioning and psychological drills.

To simulate real-world conditions, he underwent closed-environment confinement training in pitch-black chambers for up to half a day. He progressed from controlled pool trials to freshwater tests in rivers and finally to open-sea operations under the guidance of veteran pilot Ye Cong.