How Did Sealab Work?

we do plenty of that. There was a time, though, during the early years of space exploration, that aquanauts were pushing the limits of how deep humans could dive under the ocean and how long they could stay down there. Sea Lab, a program launched by the U. S. Navy in nineteen sixty four, was intended to figure out how to send divers down into the freezing, high pressure environments of the deep sea for longer periods of time than anyone had ever thought possible, and the program was a

big success until it wasn't anymore. It's always challenging to get a human body free swimming at any great depth, of the reason being that our bodies are not made to withstand millions of gallons of water being piled on top of us. Divers have to breathe pressurized air, which contains inert gases nitrogen mainly, that dissolve into the bloodstream and tissues, which works out great so long as the

weight of the entire ocean keeps them compressed. If a diver wants to come up to the surface, they must do it slowly in order to avoid the gases making little bubbles in their blood, migrating to their joints and causing decompression sickness sometimes called the bends, which is unspeakably painful and sometimes fatal. In the early nineteen sixties, a Navy physician named George Bond figured out how to let people explore the ocean in a new way through a

technique called saturation diving. In his laboratory experiments, Bond was able to saturate the blood with inert gases like helium in such a way that divers could not only go deep, they could stay down indefinitely so long as they had the right set up and a shelter. Divers could become acclimated to a habitat two hundred feet that's sixty below

the surface, and free dive even deeper from there. We spoke with Ben Hellworth, the author of Sea Lab America's Forgotten Quest to live and work on the ocean floor. He described it this way. Dr Bond's breakthroughs were a little bit like the diving equivalent of breaking the sound barrier. It was a quantum leap in technology over what the

diving parameters had been for more than a century. Sea Lab one, the first iteration of the Sea Lab experiment, was housed in a steel tube fifty seven feet long that's about seventeen meters that was lowered onto the ocean floor off the coast of Bermuda in July nineteen sixty four at a depth of a hundred and ninety two feet that's about fifty nine Four men successfully stayed submerged in this pod for eleven days, and the experiment went so well that Sea Lab two was submerged off the

coast of California at a depth of two hundred and five feet that's sixty two mems in August of the next year. Sea Lab two had hot showers, a refrigerator, and a dolphin named Tuffy trained to deliver supplies and rescue aquanuts if necessary. After a thirty days stay in Sea Lab two, aquanut and astronauts Scott Carpenter spoke to President Lyndon Johnson from his helium atmosphere decompression chamber, sounding like a cartoon chipmunk. He might have sounded ridiculous, but

his three was made. He had survived a month at a pressure of one and three p s I, which is seven times that of Earth's atmosphere. President Johnson told Carpenter, I want you to know that the nation is very proud of you. Only a few years later, though, a fatal accident on Sea Lab three, which was situated on the sea floor off the coast of California at a depth of six hundred feet that's a hundred and eighty

three meters, would shut the program down. Hellworth said most people involved were aware that this was a dangerous operation. They always knew. It had been Sea Lab one and Sea Lab two had gone well with no major injuries. After the tragedy on Sea Lab three, they all expected to press on, but the Navy didn't see it that way,

so the program was canceled. It was still a low profile enough program that there wasn't a national uproar about giving up the race to the bottom of the ocean that you would expect if they had tried to cancel the Space program two years earlier after the Apollo one launch pad fire that killed three astronauts. I think everyone expected the program to go on, but for various reasons,

it didn't. We still use the technical breakthroughs George Bond pioneered with the Sea Lab program, mostly in the oil industry, setting up oil platforms. Saturation divers can go to a job site hundreds of feet below the surface and stay down there for an entire eight hour shift. It's a dangerous job, but it can pay around fourteen hundred dollars a day. Most of us have those saturation divers to

thank for the fuel in our gas tanks. But George Bond's vision was not just industrial, it was military and civilian and scientific. He solved the problem of going deeper and staying longer. But after Sea Lab was canceled, it turned out the industry is where the money was. Any military application equipping military submarines to release saturation divers as spies during the Cold War, for instance, would be highly

classified and therefore are hard to document. But there is one place on Earth where a Sea Lab type facility still exists for scientific research, the Aquarius Reef base south of the Florida Keys, and it's been an operation for over twenty years. Scientists can go down there sixty feet that's eighteen meters below the surface and live anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks running experiments on the reef. Hellworth said Dr Bond's vision was science related.

He thought we ought to have sea lab like bases set up in the ocean wherever there might be something of interest to study and observe. We should get to know that environment better because there's value to spending time in the ocean, just like there was value in Jane Goodall's being able to sit and observe in the jungle. Once you're down there and can stay a while, you really don't know what you're going to see. That's how

we discover things. Today's episode was written by Jesceline Shields and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeart Media and How Stuff Works. For more in this and lots of other pressurized topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com.