The habitat’s power and communication lines came from shore, but Cousteau had sought to cut a few umbilical cords and minimize the habitat’s reliance on surface support. Like Bond, he wanted to move toward designs that would make future habitats as autonomous as possible once placed on the seabed. In addition to its own supply of fresh water, Conshelf Three carried its own breathing gas for added self-sufficiency. The habitat was also designed to rise like a hot air balloon so that the oceanauts could float it back to the surface on their own, without the aide of cranes. The sphere would also double as their decompression chamber.
The six-man Conshelf crew was far smaller than Sealab’s, so during its planned two-week stay on the bottom it would collectively spend less time in the water and accumulate less physiological data than the three Sealab teams. But these rival oceanauts faced many of the same hostile conditions, darkness and the bite of helium-enhanced cold among them, and they were doing it at greater depths, with the help of Bond’s friend Charlie Aquadro, who was entering his third year as a medical adviser. Cousteau’s younger son, Philippe, twenty-four, was in charge of shooting a film while living with the five others in Conshelf, but a big part of the oceanauts’ mission was to demonstrate that undersea living was more than just a boon to cinematographers or oceanographers. One of Conshelf Three’s prime sponsors was the French government’s petroleum research office, which had also underwritten Conshelf Two’s Red Sea sojourn. So while Sealab II focused on work designed to be useful to the military, the oceanauts of Conshelf Three had an industrial raison d’être. Several of Cousteau’s men had been trained to work on a vertical stack of pipes and valves known in the oil business as a “Christmas tree,” the wellhead structure for seabed drilling, which looked like an elaborate thirty-foot spire. Surface divers making short-duration dives the old-fashioned way already played an important role in the growing offshore oil industry, and Cousteau’s team planned to lower a mock Christmas tree to demonstrate that the oceanauts could make repairs on it at a depth of 370 feet, an atmosphere deeper than their spherical habitat. Oil engineers would be watching via closed-circuit television as the oceanauts showed off the value of saturation diving for putting in long hours and working at the greater depths the oil industry hoped to reach.
Back in the Pacific, on Sunday, September 26, at seven-thirty in the morning, Scott Carpenter took a last breath from Sealab II and made the short swim to the Personnel Transfer Capsule. Fifteen minutes later, after the others had followed, Bob Barth was the last to leave Sealab. He crawled up into the PTC and closed the hatch, sealing in the pressure of seven atmospheres. All ten aquanauts squeezed into the capsule, taking seats on either the upper or lower bench around the inside wall. Those seated up top dangled their legs in front of the guys on the bottom. In case of severe jostling, especially once the PTC broke the surface, everyone put on football helmets—the state of the art in personnel transfer safety.
The big crane on the Berkone began gradually reeling in the PTC so it could be mated to the deck decompression chamber, a process that would take a couple of hours. Once out of the water Barth could see out a little porthole as the thirteen-ton capsule started swinging like a wrecking ball over the Berkone. It looked like the Keystone Kops out there. Berkone crew members ran every which way as they struggled to unbolt and remove the capsule’s four-legged base, and manhandled the swinging hulk into position over the hatch of the deck decompression chamber. Each passing swell rocked the Berkone and threatened to send the PTC into an unwieldy orbit over the deck. Barth could hear the shouting and cussing outside and he might have found the scene funny except that his life was literally on the line. The return to the surface exposed the aquanauts to as much danger as anything on the bottom, much like the dramatic reentry into the atmosphere for an orbiting spacecraft. The drama here revolved around getting a solid, airtight seal between the PTC hatch and the chamber hatch. As always, the seal was essential to prevent a lethal loss of pressure. So was avoiding accidental damage to the swinging PTC, like the hole in the capsule that Dr. Thompson plugged with his thumb during the return from Sealab I. Any real gusher of a leak and—within seconds—they’d have a capsule full of puffy corpses, casualties of explosive decompression. The aquanauts all knew that no matter how well things went on the bottom, they still faced the inherent dangers of surfacing at the very end.
Once the PTC was safely in place, the aquanauts inside opened the hatch in the floor and climbed into the chamber below as if going down a manhole. The chamber climate had been adjusted so that it was less steamy than when the first team had had to sweat out its decompression. But for the next thirty-four hours, as they eased back to the surface at a rate of about six feet an hour, they would still feel as if they were crammed into a tiny locker room. The chamber was just over twenty feet long and ten feet in diameter. It did have a toilet, a big improvement over mayonnaise jar urinals.
Scott Carpenter broke up the monotony of decompression by playing standards like “Goodnight, Irene” on his ukulele. His singing sounded exactly like a crooning Donald Duck. Carpenter took quite a few congratulatory calls, including one from President Lyndon Johnson, who was at his ranch outside Austin that weekend. A call from the commander-in-chief could raise Sealab’s profile and should have been less complicated to put through than the fast-fizzling sea-to-sky linkup with Carpenter’s orbiting astronaut pal had been. Alas, it was not.
Captain Bond, from his post on the Berkone, brought Carpenter into a party line with a telephone company operator and a presidential operator. Carpenter’s garbled voice befuddled both operators, and the presidential operator sounded mortified by the idea of patching the president of the United States through to someone speaking an incomprehensible Chipmunk gibberish. She apparently thought a poor phone connection was to blame. Carpenter tried to explain his situation, enunciating as best he could, but hearing the operator’s obvious confusion Bond came back on the line. He gave the operator soothing but authoritative assurances that it was just helium speech and the president would understand. She should put the call through.
The operator seemed to have no idea what Bond was talking about and Carpenter was prepared to give up on the call. But Bond persisted and got through to a presidential secretary who said: “Astronaut Cooper, are you able to understand me, over?”
Carpenter replied: “Uh, yes ma’am. This is astronaut Carpenter, not astronaut Cooper, however. Could you understand that?”
“I’m sorry. I’m not able to understand you.”
The secretary apparently had astronaut Gordon Cooper on the cortex—not too surprising, since it had only been a couple of weeks since the big headlines about Cooper and the longest-duration space flight he made with Pete Conrad in Gemini 5. Carpenter was at that moment decompressing from the longest, deepest undersea stay—thirty days living and working on the seabed—but the secretary had no idea. Captain Bond again broke in to clear up the confusion and talked his way through to another secretary, who asked them to hold for a minute. Then their receivers resonated with a familiar and expansive Texas twang.
“Scott, do you read me all right?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President. I read you loud and clear. How me?”
“Fine, Scott, mighty glad to hear from you. You’ve convinced me and all the nation that whether you’re going up or down you have the courage and the skill to do a fine job.” Carpenter responded, “It’s a great crew out here… an honor to be a part of the program… everyone is happy and we are running on schedule.”
President Johnson didn’t seem to understand Carpenter any better than the telephone operators, but he forged ahead with perfunctory praise that sounded as though scripted with Carpenter’s personal status as an astronaut hero more in mind than the program of which he was a part.
“I know that being two hundred and five feet under water for thirty days and making the excursion dive that you did has been very valuable to us and has advanced our knowledge of how humans can perform in these
conditions, and I want you to know that the nation is very proud of you. You are very brave and skillful, and I am grateful that you have successfully completed this experiment.”
Carpenter put in a word for the rest of the Sealab crew, thanked the president for his interest, and apologized for the effect of the helium atmosphere on his voice.
Chuckling, Bond told Carpenter, “I’m not sure he got much of it, but at least it sounded like a good conversation!”
The day after Carpenter, Barth, Jenkins, Tolbert, Conda, and the rest of the second team emerged from the decompression chamber, they came ashore for a more formal press conference than had been the case for the first team, whose members had sat willy-nilly around a big table, as if attending a picnic, on the deck of the Berkone. The members of Team 2 took their places at a long, cloth-draped table on the stage of an auditorium at Scripps. Each aquanaut had a nameplate in front of him and microphones were placed along the table. The red, white, and blue Sealab insignia, with its downward-pointing arrow, hung on a large banner just behind the seated aquanauts. They wore their green Sealab working uniforms with an insignia patch on the left shoulder. Down in front of the stage was a scale model of the habitat, about ten feet long. Captain Bond and several others spoke from a lectern at stage right. Carpenter sat front and center at the table. It all looked as official as a NASA briefing, although not nearly as well attended.
Captain Bond opened the proceeding with some triumphant statements, highlighting the many man-hours spent on the bottom. “If we had been seeking records there would have been no shortage in that department,” he proclaimed. Bond then introduced his aquanauts, and with every introduction tossed in the sort of kind-hearted ribbing that showed why they called him Papa Topside. Each aquanaut took a moment to sum up his experience, accentuating the positive rather than dwelling on the threats they had encountered—tangled Arawaks, useless Aquasonics, anchovy invasions, the sculpin scourge, or Bill Tolbert’s close call. Mostly they just expressed gratitude for the opportunity, and gleefully echoed the sentiment that it had all been, in a word, “thrilling.”
Bond left a glowing introduction of Scott Carpenter for last. The former astronaut, no stranger to press inquiries, did his best to describe some of the “hardships”—the ocean’s biting cold, the chronic fatigue, scorpion fish stings, and the difficulty sleeping in the humid Sealab atmosphere. The Navy pilot and veteran of rigorous Project Mercury training said he had never worked harder in his life than during his thirty days on the bottom. Bond couldn’t have asked for a better pitchman.
Not surprisingly, most of the press questions were directed at Scott Carpenter. He had just lived for an unprecedented month on the hostile ocean floor, seven atmospheres below the surface, but one television reporter’s earnest question was an indication that the Man-in-the-Sea program either remained low on the national radar or was not well understood, or maybe both.
“Commander Carpenter, is undersea habitation possible and how soon?”
“It’s going on at this moment,” Carpenter replied, sounding mystified.
Also going on at that moment was Cousteau’s Conshelf Three, but no one mentioned it. The French were not the Russians, after all.
Walt Mazzone sat quietly throughout most of the proceeding. He had no use for the limelight but when ignorance seemed to cloud a room, he could be moved to clear the air. At one point in the press conference there was some talk about the habitat’s structural shortcomings, such as the lack of space for donning and doffing gear just inside the entry hatch, the lab’s foyer. Mazzone didn’t disagree, but no one seemed to see the big, pioneering picture.
“This is the second, really, manned undersea dwelling we have,” Walt Mazzone said. “Now unlike the space program, we’ve been forced to redesign on the basis of trial and error. In the space program, at least according to papers, before the first man was put into a rocket to go up, they had to guarantee to the president of the United States his absolute safety. There had to be precautionary ejection mechanisms developed and tested and tried over a period of time. Funds were no problem. When you have to build one of these for the first time and in many cases are actually taking dollars out of your own pocket to buy little things for it, then the empirical becomes the best way to build one.”
It was an honest, no-nonsense assessment, from a top Sealab officer no less, but no one followed up on it. Toward the end of the press conference, which had drifted along for a couple of hours, Mazzone spoke up again, sounding frustrated as he tried to underscore, once and for all, the point that didn’t seem to be registering. “We are really in the dawn of defining a whole new era of diving,” Mazzone said. “We can keep people on the bottom, divers on the bottom, working and available for work, and pay the sacrifice for decompression at one time.” Of course the experiment wasn’t over yet. There was still one team down, fifteen days and a very long decompression to go.
12
THE THIRD TEAM
Team 3 was in many ways the grand finale for Sealab II. The third team’s aquanauts would take part in the biggest showcase of useful work involving undersea jobs specifically tailored to meet Navy needs. Scott Carpenter’s thirty days as team leader were up, but if the papers were looking for a substitute celebrity, or if President Johnson wanted a worthy recipient for another congratulatory phone call, they needed to look no further than the astronaut’s successor as team leader, Robert Carlton Sheats. Like the other members of Team 3, Sheats had been working for the past month on board the Berkone. Captain Bond unabashedly called him “the finest man I have ever known.”
Bob Sheats was a war hero, widely admired for his die-hard exploits during World War II after being taken prisoner in the Philippines. At forty-nine he was also the oldest of the aquanauts, compact and muscular, his face a study in angles and the creases from a lifetime at sea. He looked like a gracefully aging superhero. Sheats was a master chief torpedoman but had been diving since the 1930s and attained the elite status of master diver. He had recently served as the topside diving supervisor for Sealab I, heading such novel and delicate operations as ballasting the lab with train axles. He also took part in the macabre recovery dives after the jets crashed at Bermuda, fending off the heavy narcotic haze to reach the wreckage.
Sheats’s wealth of underwater experience included the dives he was forced to make by his Japanese captors, who were after tons of silver pesos that had been dumped into Manila Bay. Filipino divers were literally killing themselves for lack of decompression schedules, so the Japanese rounded up a few imprisoned American divers, including Sheats, to lead their treasure hunt. Like many prisoners of war, Sheats endured hellish conditions and suffered from dysentery, disease, near starvation. He and a few other Americans figured they might be better off diving—and have more opportunities for escape. They made their dives using hardhat-style gear and played some ballsy tricks to undermine the enemy’s silver-salvaging efforts. If anyone was unlikely to be bothered by Sealab’s hostile environment, it was Bob Sheats.
George Bond had first met Sheats in 1954, when Bond was newly stationed at Pearl Harbor. Sheats found Bond’s brand of dedication to diving infectious and the two quickly became friends and diving buddies. Both men also enjoyed good, deep conversation on almost any subject. The two remained friends and Bond was especially glad to have Sheats leading the third team, whose performance would in many ways be the most critical to bolstering Navy support for Man-in-the-Sea. Team 3 aquanauts would continue to tend to equipment like the weather station and carry on some other planned Scripps research projects, but a primary function over the final fifteen days would be to show what sea-dwelling aquanauts could do in the arena of salvage and rescue. Navy divers like Sheats were steeped in submarine rescue techniques and the often grueling business of salvaging ships and other objects, large and small, from the sea floor.
Among Bob Sheats’s many admired qualities as a master diver was his obsession with safety. Before his team went down he ordered five pairs of sol
ed wet suit boots for better protection from the ubiquitous scorpion spikes. Sheats believed Commander Carpenter had made a great leader for the first two teams, but also felt there had been some lapses in safety procedures, at least by Sheats’s standards. Also on Sheats’s mind were some unresolved problems with the gas-recycling Mark VI, beyond the breathing gear’s usual peculiarities. Divers were finding that a rig set up and calibrated to last, say, an hour and seven minutes, might run out of gas after only three-quarters of an hour. This forced the aquanauts into an unwelcome game of rig roulette. When they started a dive with the Mark VI they couldn’t be sure how long their gas supply would actually last. They were also having problems with leaks. With water in the breathing circuit the rig would lose its ability to filter out carbon dioxide. The Mark VI still had no warning lights or alarms, so these problems meant the diver had to be that much more attentive to any of the subtle signs of trouble, like feeling light-headed. Sheats couldn’t help thinking that where safety was concerned, the Mark VI had a long way to go. Yet for some reason—perhaps his friendship with Captain Bond, perhaps the allure of living in the sea before his impending retirement—neither the dubious behavior of the Mark VI nor the program’s trial-and-error approach were enough to dissuade even a stickler for safety from taking his place with the pioneers of undersea living.
Soon after Sheats and the third team settled into Sealab, the gutted fuselage of an F-86 jet, minus its wings, was lowered to the ocean floor for a first major test of a method for salvaging lost planes. Sheats was going to run a first test with Bill Meeks, a chipper thirty-four-year-old boatswain’s mate with a long face and deep-set eyes. Sheats had known Meeks since the two served together on a Navy submarine rescue vessel a decade earlier. Meeks was then fresh out of diving school and was paired with Sheats during a training mission off Lahaina on Maui. They were doing breath-holding dives—the kind practiced at the two escape training tanks—to identify mines before their ship recovered them. On a lungful of air, they would swim down a hundred feet to where the practice mines were tethered. When Meeks injured his lung lining from excessive hyperventilating, a medic was dispatched from Pearl Harbor on an old DC-3. That’s how Meeks was introduced to Dr. George Bond.
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