New@CML: Sealab: America’s Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor
Ben Hellwarth’s Sealab is the underwater Right Stuff: the story of how a U.S. Navy program sought to develop the marine equivalent of the space station—and forever changed man’s relationship to the sea.
While NASA was trying to put a man on the moon, the U.S. Navy launched a series of daring experiments to prove that divers could live and work from a sea-floor base. When the first underwater “habitat” called Sealab was tested in the early 1960s, conventional dives had strict depth limits and lasted for only minutes, not the hours and even days that the visionaries behind Sealab wanted to achieve—for purposes of exploration, scientific research, and to recover submarines and aircraft that had sunk along the continental shelf. The unlikely father of Sealab, George Bond, was a colorful former country doctor who joined the Navy later in life and became obsessed with these unanswered questions: How long can a diver stay underwater? How deep can a diver go?