Sealab

by Ben Hellwarth

  In order to alleviate if not entirely avoid the various effects of HPNS, the divers were compressed slowly, with hydrogen gradually added to their artificial atmosphere. It took two weeks for them to reach a simulated depth of about 2,220 feet, thirty feet less than the Atlantis record and eighty feet shy of the target depth. Just one of the three Comex test subjects—the one known to be the least sensitive to the unpredictable effects of HPNS—crawled into an adjoining chamber and closed and sealed a hatch. He alone would experience the pressure of another two and a half atmospheres to reach a depth of 2,300 feet. Once at depth, he was put through some familiar pokes, prods, and tests. He exhibited only minor signs of HPNS, a slight tremor. He remained at depth, seventy atmospheres away, for three hours. At that point the Comex researchers eased off the pressure so he could open the hatch and rejoin his fellow divers in the adjoining chamber, where they were held at 2,200 feet or so for three days.

  As pressure in the chamber was reduced, the testing continued and the three made a number of progressively shallower dives in a wet pot, to better simulate actual diving conditions. Their decompression went on this way for twenty-four days. Although symptoms of HPNS had been reduced, they were not eliminated. When the whole experiment was over, the trio had been locked in one test chamber or another for forty-two consecutive days, breathing the hydrogen-rich atmosphere much of the time. Henri Delauze proclaimed Theo Mavrostomos, who had reached 2,300 feet, to be the deepest diver in the world. Despite that distinction, he would remain lesser known than, say, the celebrated dogs and monkeys first launched into space. But his Greek origins fittingly evoked the ancient tradition of sponge diving and man’s earliest attempts to dive deeper and stay longer. His Comex record still stands, although the Atlantis researchers would diplomatically contend that their experimental dive of a decade earlier, down to 2,250 feet, was at least as meaningful a record, since its duration was a full twenty-four hours, enough time to allow for saturation—and whatever effects might come from it. In any case, all of the deep forays were part of the process of finding answers to those old, even ancient, questions.

  In the mid-1960s, around the time of Sealab II, George Bond had optimistically predicted that divers would reach depths of three thousand feet within a few years, at least on an experimental basis, with hydrogen likely in the mix. Jacques Cousteau had already made headlines with his pronouncement about the coming of Homo aquaticus. But as the twentieth century came to a close, researchers were seeing evidence of an ultimate pressure barrier, a depth beyond which man as a free-swimming saturation diver could not safely go.

  Researchers were finding that even with just the right mix of breathing gases, pressure created the ultimate barrier, mainly because high pressure triggered HPNS. At the very least, as suggested by animal studies, a human diver was likely to go into convulsions. Dyspnea—that eerie sensation of not getting enough oxygen even when you are—along with hallucinations and other unpredictable effects might not be fatal themselves, but they were difficult to anticipate and could put a diver in danger, especially if working deep in the sea rather than being monitored in a test chamber. Still, some people, like Theo Mavrostomos, were less susceptible to high pressure than others, so some might be able to reach substantially deeper depths than others. But how much deeper?

  Studies on animals indicated that Homo sapiens would not fare well, and perhaps not even survive beyond depths of somewhere between about 2,500 and three thousand feet. But no one knew for sure. With research funding reduced to a trickle, questions would linger. HPNS had always been a wild card, yet it had successfully been held in check throughout the long-duration German dives, at least down to two thousand feet. The Atlantis and Comex dives offered further glimpses into a deeper future. In some cases, too, researchers had found that HPNS symptoms would eventually pass, as if divers somehow became acclimatized to the pressure. That phenomenon, like a number of others related to HPNS, was not well understood, but it did seem to leave open the possibility that saturation divers really could go deeper still, if anyone was willing to try.

  It was not out of the question that divers might somehow cross a pressure threshold and break free of HPNS, like astronauts who must endure punishing g-forces to escape the earth’s gravitational field, but once in space find themselves in a comfortable state of weightlessness. Divers, however, would still have to contend with the uncomfortable and potentially deadly effect that high pressure had on their breathing gases by making the gases more dense, and thus more like breathing a liquid. In fact, the idea of breathing a liquid instead of gases, like a fetus in the womb, had been tried in the 1960s on animals with impressive results. Liquid breathing, often referred to as fluid breathing, was the concept behind Cousteau’s prediction about Homo aquaticus. George Bond, too, once saw great potential in fluid breathing. It could eliminate the need for decompression, but in the end a fluid breather still couldn’t escape the effects of pressure, and therefore the unpredictable effects of HPNS.

  To one of the old questions—How deep can a man go?—there appeared to be an answer. It seemed clear from the German experiments and other research that divers could safely reach depths down to two thousand feet, and that they could live those many atmospheres away for an indefinite duration. But the other old question—How long can a man stay down?—begged a further question: Does that man have a place to live?

  Setting up habitats across the continental shelves and slopes of the world was still possible, and at much greater depths than the few atmospheres at which Hydrolab or Tektite were placed. President Johnson’s blue-ribbon panel, impressed by Sealab and Conshelf, had recommended spending half a billion dollars to set up sea-based laboratories on the continental shelf, both fixed and portable. The approach gaining momentum was to develop a mobile habitat that would be more autonomous than Ed Link’s Sea-Link, but not as big and mission-specific as a Navy spy submarine with a built-in mini-habitat. The vessel would be more like the kind of mobile laboratory that Argyronète was supposed to become before Cousteau ran out of money.

  After more than a decade in storage, the unfinished Argyronète was acquired in the early 1980s by a partnership of Comex and IFREMER, the French government’s oceanic research agency. Henri Delauze, who once “carried Cousteau’s bags,” as he would sardonically say, was now going to take over the project his more celebrated countryman had been unable to complete. Within a few years IFREMER and Comex spent millions more francs to transform Argyronète into a vessel unlike any other in the world. When Cousteau asked for royalties for the use of its name, the partners promptly rechristened it with a more pragmatic-sounding moniker: Sous-marin d’Assistance à Grande Autonomie, or SAGA I, whose name trumpeted its highly autonomous design. The Roman numeral was an indication that Delauze hoped to build a larger version, SAGA II, if all went well.

  With its built-in mini-habitat for up to six saturation divers, SAGA I provided both a hyperbaric shelter and mobility. It was equipped to remain submerged for up to four weeks and had the capacity to cover a radius of 150 miles from a home port. The divers could leave their pressurized quarters at depths down to nearly fifteen hundred feet. The sub was also equipped to release remotely operated vehicles at almost two thousand feet.

  At the launch of the first SAGA in 1987, the French prime minister, Jacques Chirac, came to Marseille to see it for himself—although it wasn’t so unusual for the French to give their undersea ventures the kind of attention reserved for the space program in the United States. The SAGA was a chubby-looking sub, painted a jubilant yellow that brought to mind the beloved yellow submarine in the animated Beatles movie. It was another couple of years before the SAGA went out on its first commercial assignment. The undersea worksite happened to be off the dazzling coast of Monaco, where years before Delauze had met with Cousteau and declined a tempting job offer. From its hangar in Marseille, the SAGA sailed a hundred miles to the east along the scenic Côte d’Azur to the dive site. At the end of August 1989, the sub positioned
itself on the bottom for some otherworldly work at a sewer outfall, at a depth of about 330 feet. The divers then swam out of their yellow submarine to spend more than five hours on the job, followed the next day by a second shift.

  Nine months later, in May 1990, the SAGA ventured eastward along the coast to Cap Benat, near Toulon, where Comex divers locked out at a trial depth of 1,040 feet, far surpassing Ed Link’s old record with his first lockout submersible, Deep Diver. Six months after that demonstration, the SAGA sailed out to the Frioul Islands, just a few miles offshore from Marseille, in the same area where Cousteau and his Calypso crew recovered relics from a Roman shipwreck in the early 1950s. Delauze, too, was forever fascinated with finding and retrieving artifacts from the sea floor. In the 1960s, he had lured Robert Sténuit away from Ocean Systems, not long after Ed Link formed the company, and put the Belgian diver in charge of archaeological missions that Delauze sponsored for years through Comex. Now, out around the pale rocky islands where Cousteau shot the film footage featured years before in his American television debut, Delauze would get some airtime for himself. The SAGA slipped beneath the surface, down to a depth of two atmospheres or so, and Delauze locked out of the submarine with Nicolas Hulot, a French ecologist and host of a popular TV program, who filmed the dive for a documentary.

  The yellow submarine clearly had potential, but a new director of IFREMER cut off his agency’s funding. Delauze had intended to find a commercial niche for his craft, but market forces effectively drove the SAGA back into its storage hangar, where it has remained. In 2001 it was given to the city of Marseille. As one Comex employee put it, the SAGA was a solution looking for a problem. One problem was clear: not enough money. Even Henri Delauze, who was more eager than most to invest in new undersea technologies, could not foot the bill alone.

  Back in the United States, some had lobbied for a wet NASA, an agency whose civilian purposes, and therefore funding, could transcend practical industrial needs and operational military requirements. Such an agency would also work with industry and the military, especially the Navy, but would be in a powerful position to pursue undersea exploration for exploration’s sake—and an updated Man-in-the-Sea program that took fresh aim at depth barriers and deep frontiers previously untouched. Missions could be undertaken for purposes of exploration, or science, or simply because the inquisitive human species is a pioneering species. Why, after all, learn to fly? Why go to the moon? Why go West? Why climb Everest?

  A wet NASA was not to be, but in the mid-1970s, as Argyronète languished, NOAA got a million and a half dollars to draw up preliminary plans for a mobile undersea laboratory. The American plans heeded the call of Johnson’s blue-ribbon commission for Sealab-style outposts on the continental shelf and down to the continental slope. The vessel envisioned was called Oceanlab. The basic blueprint called for the mobility and autonomy of a submarine, equipped so that researchers could lock out and get directly into their undersea environment, to observe, explore, or do whatever useful work they needed to do, as free-swimming saturation divers. With a depth capability of a thousand feet or so, this mobile lab would give researchers and explorers of all stripes a way to visit thousands of acres of undersea frontier. It might also be designed to launch ROVs, remotely operated vehicles, or even small submersibles if necessary. In other words, Oceanlab might look a lot like the SAGA.

  A preliminary review found no shortage of scientific interest in Oceanlab, much as there had been ample civilian interest in Sealab. A list of four hundred research proposals was compiled, research that might best be carried out directly by man in the sea, rather than by other means, like from inside a submersible. The list effectively echoed George Bond’s scientific sermons about making great mineral discoveries, meteorological discoveries, medical discoveries, and discoveries about how to harvest edible protein to feed a growing population. As Bond was preaching early on, the very survival of the human species depended on pursuing a whole range of undersea activities.

  A few years later, about the time of Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory in the 1980 presidential race, the Department of Commerce, the Office of Management and Budget, Congress, and others got a look at the plans for Oceanlab and its potential price tag: upwards of $25 million. That was considerably less than the French partners spent on the SAGA I and a drop in the bucket compared to space program budgets. Some might even call it a bargain. Nonetheless, the Oceanlab plans were shelved. The nation that poured billions into the moon shot—and had lately entered the space shuttle business—was not in the mood to attempt any sort of like-minded quest in the sea, even at a fraction of the cost, even if the rewards might rival those reaped in space. Reports that the Russians were planning a mobile undersea laboratory of their own, presumably for nonmilitary purposes, did not spark a Sputnik-like reaction in the United States.

  The press scarcely took note of the Oceanlab plans. And very soon, two important voices for man in the sea would no longer be heard. Ed Link died on Labor Day in 1981, at his modest home in Binghamton, New York. He was seventy-seven and had been in deteriorating health, but that had not stopped him from expressing dismay at the poor design of his wheelchair. Just a couple of weeks before his death, he had pledged to build a better one. George Bond died less than two years later, in 1983, at the age of sixty-seven. He was buried in Bat Cave, in the little hillside cemetery at the Church of the Transfiguration, his regular sanctuary during those long days as a country doctor. The Ocean Simulation Facility was dedicated to Captain Bond in 1991, and the Navy that had once shunned his ideas officially recognized him as “the father of saturation diving.” Captain Walter Mazzone, who might justly be called “the other father of saturation diving,” kept busy with a variety of projects after his Navy retirement, as was his energetic way. Soon after celebrating his ninety-first birthday in January 2009, he attended a final reunion of Sealab personnel. His handcrafted stained glass had long been prized at reunion raffles.

  Jacques-Yves Cousteau had once talked about building at least two more Conshelf habitats with the ultimate goal of housing divers at more than six hundred feet. Instead Cousteau embarked on Argyronète, but when the money ran out, he would abandon saturation diving and undersea living to focus on popularizing ocean research and conservation through his books, movies, and television programs. Long before Cousteau died in 1997 at the age of eighty-seven, at his home in Paris, his name had become synonymous with exploring the silent undersea world, if not with the quest to live in it.

  The U.S. Navy, a benevolent big brother to the friendly rivals, eased out of saturation diving, in part for reasons similar to those of the offshore industry—the high cost, advances in ROVs and other undersea technologies, including one-atmosphere diving suits, sometimes called hard suits. The concept of hard suits had been around for years, since eighteenth-century designs that weren’t much more than barrels with arm holes. Modern one-atmosphere suits look like a cross between an armored space suit and a robot costume. In essence, the suit works like a submarine that a diver can wear: It keeps the external pressure out and a comfortable single atmosphere of pressure inside, with ordinary air to breathe. That means no worries about compression, decompression, gas mixtures, narcosis, or HPNS.

  At the dawn of the twenty-first century, innovative designs, improved materials, and technology combined to make possible some one-atmosphere suits that are sturdy enough to keep thousands of pounds of water pressure at bay, but also agile enough to give a diver the mobility and dexterity that had mostly been lacking. In 2006, off the coast of La Jolla, once home to the Tiltin’ Hilton, a Navy diver donned one of the latest one-atmosphere suits and was lowered, like a robot on a fishing line, to a record depth of two thousand feet, for a brief stay. Like ROVs, the new hard suits are another valuable undersea tool, and have gained popularity in the Navy and in the offshore industry. Still, neither is quite the same as dispatching a free-swimming diver.

  The Navy’s two submarine rescue ships, the Pigeon and the Ortolan, equ
ipped with saturation systems when they were built in the early 1970s, were taken out of service by the mid-1990s. At about that time, ironically, the Navy got involved in a multiyear undersea project for which saturation diving was the key. This was the salvage of the USS Monitor, the famous ironclad gunship that sank during the Civil War in a storm off North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The wreck was at a depth of 240 feet. Saturation diving was clearly the best way for Navy divers to reach the sunken ship and work on it, so the Navy rented a saturation system from a commercial diving company.

  The joint operation with NOAA became one of the largest archaeological recovery projects ever conducted. By the project’s end, in 2002, divers working with surface crews had recovered Monitor’s steam engine, a significant portion of its hull, and its gun turret, along with smaller artifacts. In the meantime, the Elk River, the support ship for Sealab III that had been turned into a saturation diving school, had gone into mothballs and was ultimately sunk in gunnery practice in 2001. Sealab III, which might have made a worthy Smithsonian exhibit, if nothing else, had long ago been cut up for scrap, despite Captain Bond’s hope that the habitat could somehow be resurrected.

  After Sealab, Bob Barth was one of the many divers who found his way into the oil patch. Barth initially went to work in the Middle East for Henri Delauze and Comex, as did Bill Meeks, Barth’s buddy from Sealab II. Within a couple of years they left Comex to start their own diving company in Dubai. They opened several offices around the world and ran their company through the mid-1970s before selling it.