Every American knows the names Mercury , Gemini and Apollo . At the sunup of the space age , another frontier was under exploration , too — although it never had the fanfare or funding that the astronauts receive .
Deep in the ocean , aquanaut , imbued with their own sub - aquatic strain of the Right Stuff , began building the undersea interpretation of a space station . Here is how decade of scientific and technological breakthroughs led these pioneering frogman to the commission that just enfold up at the Aquarius Reef Base .
The Secret To Staying Down
For most Americans , Aquariusisn’t a household name , and neither is the revolutionary approaching to mystifying - sea diving that made it all possible , a conception called saturation diving event . Sat diving , for short , is as pregnant to underwater exploration as supersonic flight is to the sky . Without it , there would have been no Aquarius , and no Sealab , or any of the other sixty or so submersed bases that descend before it .
Saturation diving was ab initio dismissed as impractical if not fantastical . But it call on out to be the key fruit to pushing beyond the long - accept limits that prevent divers from pass very mysterious or staying down for very long . They typically had to resurface after a subject of mo , rather than the hours and days now commonplace at a base like Aquarius . Sat dive was a risky and uncertain proposition back in the late fifties , when an obscure U.S. Navy doctor cite George Bond start running laboratory test with brute and then feigning with human volunteers . He want to find out whether this newfangled approach to diving event could actually figure out — or if it would just cause awful inner injuries and , possibly , unceremonious death .
If it did work , though , then loon — soon to be get it on as aquanauts — could do a variety of problem outside of a pressurized , climate - controlled undersea nucleotide , much as astronauts do at the International Space Station . The development of sit diving event was not just a matter of getting the geared wheel right but of getting the scientific discipline right . During an ordinary prima donna — whether using modernistic Aqua-Lung or the iconic hardhat scheme , with the bulbous helmet and heavy sheet suit — a diver ’s descent and tissues become partially saturated with the gas he or she breathes . That gas could be the 79 - percentage nitrogen , 20 - per centum oxygen mix of even atmosphere , or a different formula as ask on recondite dives . Either path , at the end of a dive , divers have to undergo the procedure of decompression , a cautiously integrated timetable to reserve for the gradual liberation of those immerse gas before coat . Without adequate decompressing , a underwater diver ’s innards will ripple like an undetermined can of soda , which is what causes the dreadful and quite possibly lethal phenomenon popularly known as “ the bends . ”
With vividness diving event , as the name implies , a diver ’s rake and tissues are allow to become completely saturated with the gases being take a breather . Back in Dr. Bond ’s day that sound like a dying sentence , in part because it would take about a day to become saturated , and then decompressing would be interminable — if it was even potential to safely rid a body of all that absorbed gas . No one know . But Bond and his acolytes figured out that a saturated diver could remain at depth indefinitely . decompressing could be remit for hours , days , or even weeks , if a saturated diver had a properly equipped habitat . It would have to have mobilise air that was also pressurized to oppose the piss pressure outside . , and a hatch in the story that could give to allow aquanaut in and out . Bond and his team invented this type of habitat , which had one caveat : Surfacing could not be an option . Once saturated at profoundness , a frogman could go deep , but a unmediated rise to the surface , without decompression , well , that would be regretful . Decompression would be possible — at Aquarius today , the unconscious process occupy about 18 hours . The researchers showed how one recollective decompressing was a small Mary Leontyne Price to pay to live and play for days on the seabed .
The Undersea Village
The legendary Jacques Cousteau and the American inventor Ed Link picked up on the concept of saturation diving event , and began try out some underlying habitats of their own designs in 1962 . Cousteau called his habitat undertaking “ Conshelf , ” light for Continental Shelf Station , and came up with a duad of more forward-looking Conshelf habitats the following summer . He wish to call it the public ’s first submarine village . The deepness was similar to Aquarius , where the seabed is about sixty foot below the control surface , which puts the habitat entry at about 45 feet . By 1964 , postdate the favorable results of Bond ’s science lab experimentation , the U.S. Navy put up a little money — about $ 200,000 — to create a prototype habitat of its own , called Sealab I. Nearly two hundred foot below the surface , about 25 miles southeast of Bermuda , the base became the first major demonstration of the concept of intensity diving at sea . By conventional , short - length diving criterion , that deepness — and the fact that the four Sealab aquanauts were equipped to stick down for three calendar week — was off the diving charts of the era . There were a few near call , but it all seemed to influence .
The Navy was impressed enough to gift in a Modern project : Sealab II . begin in 1965 , off the coast of La Jolla near San Diego , it became a triumphant showcase for saturation diving event and ocean dwelling house . A Sealab III was built — and by then , some scientist see a continuing serial of habitats , like NASA ’s space programs . But in 1969 , a few months before the first moon landing , tragedy scratch Sealab III , killing a diver at the astounding deepness of six hundred feet . As the space program received ever more money and medium attention , the Navy quietly allowed Sealab to fleet away .
It came down to the scientist who had taken part in Sealab to keep the vision of ocean bases alert . leave the Navy ’s musical theme of a military exercise — they saw a unique research opportunity , as aquanauts had so much more clock time than diver to note , carry studies , run experiments , accumulate data , and loosely get well acquaint with the marine environment . In the meantime , NASA had its own programme — to that way , an underwater frontier settlement seemed like a honest analog to living in blank . The agency co - fund two labor , Tektite I and II , which reinvent habitat architecture with some strange excogitation . At a depth of 45 feet , Tektite was a shallow process compare to Sealab , which had been labor toward the thousand - foot mark . But four oceanaut lived there for a disc - setting 60 days , proving that when study nautical life is concern , duration can be as important as astuteness .
An Open Frontier
Underwater exploration through the 1970s gave agency to idle mix of designs under public and secret funding . First , the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ( NOAA ) grease one’s palms a 43 - foot tank - like home ground called Hydrolab , a little lab that commence as a project of Florida Atlantic University in the 1960s when Sealab and Conshelf first trip pedantic interest in ocean alkali . As it was change and improved over the yr , Hydrolab went on to house several hundred scientist - aquanauts over the course of many missions die hard through the mid-‘80s , in the waters off Bermuda and St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands . NOAA ’s ownership of the science laboratory probably saved it from tanking — some in private - financed habitats of the geological era did not fare as well , like Aegir , another American - built ocean dwelling .
bring up for the Norse god of the sea , Aegir was the centerpiece of a marine research gist in Hawaii and was test to depths of more than five hundred feet . It had the face of a craft out of Star Wars , with a matching twain of cylindrical chambers laid end to end and connect by a ten - base spheroid diving station reminiscent of Darth Vader ’s escape seedcase . That structure was mount on a platform and flank , pontoon - like , by two slight cylinders — part of an innovative buoyancy ascendency organization that gave Aegir a mobile boundary over habitats like Sealab , which had to be lowered to the seabed by crane . Once towed out to a website , Aegir could submerse and coat with the repose of a sub , another augury of progress in home ground figure . But by former 1973 , a few months before NASA set up the first U.S. blank space station , the Aegir operation went belly - up .
So a undertaking cite for a god could n’t make it , and yet one called La Chalupa — a name that rough translates from Spanish as “ gravy boat with a tendency to capsize”—became one of the most successful of the era , largely thanks to a contract with the Puerto Rican government . Built by the individual Marine Resources Development Foundation , this one looked like a barge on the exterior , 50 feet long and 20 feet wide , but contained two interconnected army tank - like chambers as aliveness quarters deep down .
Like Aegir , La Chalupa had the benefit of buoyancy control and corking informality of mobility . Bill Todd , NASA ’s current project conductor of NEEMO , which play cosmonaut training deputation at Aquarius , call La Chalupa ’s design “ splendid , ” even by today ’s standards . It was built to fit crews of five for up to a calendar month and could be placed at depths down to a hundred animal foot . La Chalupa was the base for a series of a dozen productive missions , at several locations around Puerto Rico , through the mid-1970s . Then the Puerto Rican funding ran out , and there seemed to be no other taker . After being brought back to Florida , where it had been built , La Chalupa languished for a tenner but was last commute into Jules ’ Undersea Lodge , still the world ’s only underwater hotel , which sits in about 30 infantry of H2O in a Key Largo lagoon — shallow enough so that light decompressing is required , but its client still get a taste of the life history aquatic .
The Murky Future
There was a mo , around the late 1970s , when it looked as though the U.S. might lastly get serious about its manned underwater activities . Some backers of marine science and exploration were even talking about the prospect of a “ wet NASA”—an sovereign agency that could put the form of money and vim into manned undersea delegation that NASA put into human space trajectory . In the former 1980s , with the quad shuttle program well under means — at an forecast toll of at least $ 450 million per mission — the U.S. considered building Oceanlab , a kind of mobile home ground capable of delivering aquanauts to depths of a thousand infantry . It sound almost like a existent - biography translation of the Nautilus from 20,000 league Under the Sea — but without the pipework organ , library and a few other of Captain Nemo ’s interior flourish . Despite a show of ebullience from scientist , a price tag of at least $ 25 million was deemed too high in those budget - slashing years , and the plan for Oceanlab were scrapped .
or else , after Hydrolab was retired in the ‘ 80s , NOAA had a fresh , state - of - the - art home ground make . That became the Aquarius . In 1988 , from its construction internet site in Texas , Aquarius went to St. Croix to replace Hydrolab at a depth of about 50 feet . Four age afterwards , it was moved to its current location in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary , giving scientists access to the biodiversity of the third - largest living coral roadblock Witwatersrand system in the humanity .
Yet , for all its value , the government has decide that the minuscule $ 2.5 million or so a yr it spends on Aquarius isjust too much .
https://gizmodo.com/searching-for-the-oceans-secrets-from-the-last-undersea-5925852
angel worry that this previous scientific mission , which ended July 21 , could be its last . In case that funding does dry out up , the nonprofit Aquarius Foundation has hastily been set up to sample to keep the habitat survive . The close of Aquarius could also be the end of an eld of manned undersea exploration — an era that ’s still just beginning .
JournalistBen Hellwarthis the source of the new bookSEALAB : America ’s Forgotten Quest to last and Work on the Ocean Floor .
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