The Navy will name a future surveillance ship after Don Walsh, a San Diego State University graduate who, along with colleague Jacques Piccard, made the first dive to the bottom of the world’s deepest ocean in a fragile mini-sub.
On Jan. 23, 1960, they squeezed into the bathyscape Trieste and slowly sank 35,797 feet into into Challenger Deep southwest of Guam in the Mariana Trench — a region some referred to as “inner space.”
“The first penetration of the deepest parts of the ocean impressively demonstrates that the United States is in the forefront of oceanographic research,” President Dwight Eisenhower later said in awarding the explorers the Legion of Merit.
Walsh, who died in November 2023, will have his name attached to an Explorer-class tactical auxiliary general ocean surveillance (T-AGOS) ship. The new vessel will be 356 feet long and will be used by the Military Sealift Command to conduct anti-submarine surveillance.
Walsh was born in Berkeley in Nov. 2, 1931. He earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering at the U.S. Naval Academy, then a master’s degree in political science at SDSU. He also earned a doctorate in physical oceanography from Texas A&M University.
He became captain of the USS Bashaw, a submarine that operated out of San Diego.