Sealab Read online

  Link and the other members of the deep submergence group were just getting started with their review that summer as Jacques Cousteau’s team geared up for a big second act: Continental Shelf Station Number Two, “the first human colony on the sea floor,” as Cousteau showily described it. He again had the support of the National Geographic Society, a major Cousteau sponsor for a decade. This time the French national petroleum office also put up major funding, a further sign of industry interest in methods that might help divers work on deeper offshore drilling operations.

  In June 1963, two months after the Thresher loss, Cousteau led his team of some forty-five men to the Red Sea. About twenty-five miles northeast of Port Sudan, on a spectacular coral reef known as Sha’ab Rūmi, or Roman Reef, Cousteau’s team set up a pair of eye-catching undersea habitats. Starfish House, known in French as L’Etoile de Mer, was Conshelf Two’s main sanctuary. Ten yards in diameter and painted a golden yellow, Starfish House had four compartments about the size of the EDU chamber that extended, like the legs of a starfish, from a pentagonal central living area and control room. Two compartments were sleeping quarters, one housed the kitchen, laboratory, darkroom, and toilet, the fourth compartment had a shower and dive station with a hatch in the floor open to the sea. An ultraviolet lamp in the sleeping quarters allowed each Starfish House resident to lie down and tan for ten minutes a day—not a real necessity, as far as anyone knew, but the sort of thing that would look neat in a National Geographic pictorial. A pair of windows the size of car windshields gave the central living room a magnificent view of the crystalline world outside. A gray steel control console looked like a set piece from Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The chef living in the underwater abode—yes, a chef, Pierre Guibert, who manned the galley’s electric stove and appliances—prepared fine meals like Bifteck sauté marchand de vins. Bach, Mozart, and Vivaldi played on a reel-to-reel tape deck. A dozen support divers worked around the house and shuttled supplies and equipment to and from Calypso and the main utility ship, Rosaldo.

  For all its stylistic improvements over the austere Diogenes tank of Conshelf One, Starfish House represented a similarly cautious step, with greater emphasis on duration than depth. No one wanted a repeat of the Keller disaster. Starfish House, like its predecessor, was placed at a no-decompression depth of about two atmospheres and pressurized with ordinary compressed air fed by umbilical from the surface. While accidents can happen at any depth, Cousteau’s published accounts dramatically asserted that if any of these saturated divers were to swim directly to the surface, they would do so “only at peril of their lives.” If they so much as drifted above Starfish House’s roofline, he wrote, they “would die there in the shallows of massive decompression effects.” Death by direct or partial surfacing was an unlikely fate from a living depth of thirty-three feet, but if any diver got bent en route to the surface, the recompression chamber on board Rosaldo would most likely prevent injury and death.

  Starfish House served as center stage for a film Cousteau’s team was shooting to be called Le monde sans soleil, or World Without Sun, as it would be known in English, an oddly ominous title considering that their world that summer was fairly drenched in sunshine, even underwater. Claude Wesly, one half of the Diogenes duo, said the setting would make for “the most beautiful” of Cousteau’s adventures. Wesly’s counterpart in the first Conshelf experiment, Albert Falco, led the selection of the Red Sea site for Cousteau and called it “a diver’s paradise.” Location was important for the film, of course. Another big pictorial for National Geographic and a book were also in the works.

  The Red Sea water around the reef was clear and in the mid-eighties Fahrenheit, warmer than many swimming pools. Five “oceanauts,” as Cousteau took to calling his sea dwellers, including Wesly, planned to spend a full month diving and working out of their house—a veritable five-star hotel compared to the Diogenes dorm. The oceanauts could freely smoke their Gitanes, and when Cousteau swam down for a visit and a meal, he could light up a Tuscan cigar. Instead of a canary as a backup warning device, they had with them a handsome parrot named Claude, after Wesly.

  Outside Starfish House the scene included a shed for storing fish and other sea creatures. An onion-shaped dome, completely open at the bottom but kept dry inside by compressed air, served as a hangar for Cousteau’s hydro-jet mini-sub, a two-man craft shaped like a mythical flying saucer—a vessel previously featured in National Geographic. During Conshelf Two it would star as the first submarine boat to operate from an undersea base. With filmmaking and photography in mind, the oceanauts wore unusual silver-hued wet suits, instead of standard black, with matching air hoses and gloves. The silver suits made them look like a cross between oversized sardines and spacemen from a Buck Rogers–era movie.

  The most significant attempt at cracking depth and duration barriers came from Starfish House’s neighboring undersea dwelling, called Deep Cabin, a vertical structure resembling a silo. It was twenty feet tall, seven feet in diameter, and nicknamed “the rocket.” The dwelling was lowered down the side of Roman Reef, onto a ledge about eighty-five feet deep, and pressurized with an atmosphere that was a mix of helium and oxygen. Deep Cabin was three-tiered, with living quarters at the top, and a shower and dive station just below, in the midsection. Seawater filled the bottom section up to the floor of the dive station, at a depth of about three and a half atmospheres, forming a liquid looking glass in a circular opening. Two oceanauts spent an uncomfortable seven days in the stiflingly hot and humid structure. They perspired “like fountains,” as one of them said.

  Deep Cabin was in many ways a testament to the challenges of making an undersea habitat habitable. The cabin dwellers lost their appetite but forced themselves to eat and drink. One had a nagging earache. Among the more troublesome technical difficulties was a persistent gas leak—helium was the likely culprit. The Red Sea would rise into the dive station by more than a foot overnight, and the next day they would force the water out by adding more pressurized gas—the undersea equivalent of bailing water from a ship. But what if the leak got worse and flooded the entire rocket? Such unnerving thoughts made it difficult for the two oceanauts to sleep soundly, as did the oppressive cabin climate.

  Relief came from swimming outside their sweltering cabin, and most days they spent several hours in the water. Cousteau had them make some dives to 165 feet, and on the sixth of their seven days, the two oceanauts swam past a thicket of black coral along the reef and down to a depth of 330 feet. They used their Aqualungs with compressed air, which would have been considered too dangerous if they had started from the surface. But they were starting out from eighty-five feet—after several days of breathing a helium-rich artificial atmosphere. They had a hunch that this would make it possible to dive deeper with an air-filled Aqualung without getting knocked silly by the narcotic haze of nitrogen—l’ivresse des grandes profondeurs. The divers later informed Cousteau that they accidentally went all the way to 363 feet, an additional atmosphere of depth, and just shy of the 385-foot mark, from which Maurice Fargues was hauled up dead sixteen years before. They reported that they felt fine but they did not stay down for long. Squeezed by the pressure at eleven atmospheres, their lungs sucked up about eleven times as much air with each breath. Their Aqualungs were quickly depleted, even though each diver had four tanks.

  When the Deep Cabin dwellers completed their week-long stay at eighty-five feet, they swam up to Starfish House and spent the night there, using the time at thirty-three feet as a decompression stop. They surfaced with the other oceanauts the next day. This approach to making the transition from a deep habitat to the surface resembled an idea that Bond described in his “Proposal for Underwater Research.” Bond suggested that sea floor habitats be placed at depths corresponding to appropriate decompression stops, like stepping-stones or way stations, so that divers could continue to live and work as they eased their way back to the surface—a better use of time than idly decompressing in a chamber.

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nbsp; This second Conshelf venture, like the first, was more about logistics than producing physiological data. Nonetheless it did its part for the cause of undersea living. The documentary World Without Sun came out the following year and garnered Cousteau his second Oscar. Cousteau wrote another major story for National Geographic—forty-two prestigious pages of pictures and text, including a friendly, if fleeting acknowledgment of Captain Bond. That article became the basis of his fourth book, a photograph-filled work also called World Without Sun, written with Jimmy Dugan.

  There would be no film or book deals, but on August 26, 1963, about a month after Cousteau’s team had packed up Conshelf Two and left the Red Sea, Bond and Mazzone began a third chamber test with human volunteers, Genesis E. It followed the previous phase, Genesis D, and Bond liked the coincidence that E stood for Exodus, the book of the Old Testament that comes after Genesis. With the parameters of this test the New London researchers planned to double the depth and duration of their previous test at the Unit.

  For Genesis E, three people would be locked into an artificial atmosphere, at a pressure equivalent of two hundred feet, and live there for nearly two weeks. As in the wet pot at the Unit, they wanted to demonstrate that at this doubled depth a saturated diver would be physically capable of doing more vigorous deeds than planting flags or posing for pictures. “Useful work” was the catchphrase in Navy diving: A diver had to be able to do useful work. In this way they might build on the more cautious success at the Unit to produce a kind of supersonic moment—two weeks at two hundred feet—to convince the U.S. Navy, once and for all, that it ought to make the exodus from experimental chambers into the sea itself. Of course there was always a chance that this ambitious experiment might fail miserably, even fatally, and give skeptics a reason to end the entire effort.

  The researchers conducted this third human experiment at New London’s own medical laboratory, on the upper submarine base where the long-awaited pressure chamber had finally been installed. Although a modern machine, with advanced instrumentation for maintaining the desired internal atmosphere, the chamber had no wet pot. But they would make the best of it by using a variety of physical tests—such as push-ups and step-ups—to study a saturated diver’s cardiovascular function and ability to handle the kind of useful work the Navy might want divers to do. The new chamber, like the older ones, was still not designed and equipped to accommodate such long stays, but by now Bond’s subjects were accustomed to coping with an absence of plumbing and other comforts of home. Bob Barth, the original Genesis subject, again volunteered. Tiger Manning, the hospital corpsman, Barth’s chamber mate at the Unit, and Dr. John Bull, who was with Barth for the first test at Bethesda, would also reprise their roles.

  Bond and Mazzone would spend their daytime and nighttime shifts staring up at a variety of gauges and meters, including a couple of strip charts that produced data on rolls of paper, like a seismograph. These were part of the control console along one side of the new chamber’s steel exterior, with a pair of built-in desks, one at each end of the console. Between the desktops was an assortment of shiny knobs and colored lights the size of half-dollars, part of the new and improved automatic control system. A porthole over each desk gave the investigators a view inside the chamber. Someone stuck a foot-long sign over the middle of the console with the handwritten words: GENESIS SUITE.

  Once the men were locked inside the chamber, the ritual poking and prodding was more gut-wrenching than during the two previous Genesis tests. At one point, Barth and the others sported a rectal probe, an ear probe, wires in their arms, and a rubber hose that was threaded through their noses down into their stomachs. The best way to suppress the nagging nausea and generally minimize discomfort was to sit still, like monks in meditation. They were a long way from tanning beds and idyllic dives in the Red Sea, but the indignities of Genesis had to be tolerated so they could generate the data Bond needed to make his case for saturation diving. In the future that data could be the difference between success and catastrophe.

  Outside the tank, Bond and Mazzone had to work out the bugs in their state-of-the-art machine. About a week into the experiment, Bond arrived for the daytime watch and was met with a litany of special instructions from Mazzone: “Before crossing emergency jumper 210 to post 18, check humidity readout. If this reads 92 on the dial (subtract 8 for true value), then this jumper cross is unsafe, and the problem must be reevaluated…” As more gauges and electronic controls malfunctioned, the chamber console became cluttered with red “out of order” tags that reminded Bond of Christmas tree decorations. But the experiment went on, with Barth, Bull, and Manning living and breathing and bantering like Chipmunks in their pressurized atmosphere made up mostly of helium and just 4 percent oxygen. The seven-fold increase in the concentration of oxygen at seven atmospheres made it close to a surface equivalent of 28 percent instead of the usual 21 percent. The researchers had observed during the course of Genesis that a slightly elevated oxygen content seemed to improve the human test subjects’ overall performance under pressure. This was precisely the kind of insight they hoped to gain in the laboratory before facing the many complications that would come with attempting a similarly prolonged dive at sea.

  A couple of days into the experiment, in honor of Bob Barth’s thirty-third birthday, Bond and Mazzone passed a cake through a small supply airlock. Despite the chamber’s technical difficulties, the experiment was going relatively smoothly. The test subjects showed some minor changes in their physiologic functions, but nothing alarming. Through it all, George Bond recorded the events of the day in a journal, as was his habit, filling pages with his distinctive loopy script. When he set pen to paper, after hours, his vivid imagination sometimes took over, buoyed by bourbon, like so many writers before him.

  A few journal entries written during Genesis E read a lot like the secret life heroics of Walter Mitty, the daydreaming James Thurber character. In one, as Bond and Mazzone were running a preliminary pressure test, Bond described a sudden blast as “shattering glass in the room windows and rocking the chamber itself.” The new chamber “had failed, blown the cork!” Test subjects Barth, Bull, and Manning were not yet inside, fortunately. If they had been, Bond somberly wrote, they all “would have been dead.” In a similarly dramatic episode, Bond described what sounded like a “sonic boom.” The noise startled him out of a near slumber in his seat beside the chamber and then “all hell broke loose!” The pressure gauges were falling precipitously! The men inside were in danger! He rushed to the rescue, desperate to fix the cause of a potentially deadly leak. He and Mazzone assessed the situation and, soon enough, with the help of the subjects inside, things were brought under control.

  Captain Bond might never get a forty-two-page spread in National Geographic, but he liked to tell a good story and often had his narratives typed up and distributed to friends and colleagues. Everyone was accustomed to creative flourishes like the Mitty heroics and understood that Bond didn’t necessarily mean to be writing impeccable history, he was just… writing. Hyperbole was a frequent and entertaining ingredient in Bond’s otherwise true stories, but the chamber blasts were apparently outright fiction. Witnesses to those experimental days recall no sonic booms or glass-shattering explosions. If there had been, Bond’s saturation experiments might have been shut down for good. But as Bond also wrote in a more sober and factual manner, Genesis E came to a fairly uneventful end in early September 1963. After nearly twelve days living in the helium-rich atmosphere, including a decompression schedule lasting twenty-six hours, subjects Barth, Bull, and Manning showed no signs of having been done any permanent physical harm. With the Navy’s blessing, the grand exodus into the sea Bond had dreamed of leading could begin at last, five years after the first animal tests.

  8

  TRIANGLE TRIALS

  Before getting formal Navy approval to build a prototype sea dwelling, but hopeful that they might soon be taking their experiments from the lab into the sea, Bond and Mazzone, in
typical moonlighting fashion, got hold of a surplus “survival pod.” A sturdy steel structure, circular and domed, like a slightly larger version of the igloo at the Unit, it had originally served as an escape chamber for storm-battered crews of a Texas Tower. These towers had been built at sea, along the East Coast, to house Air Force radar stations. The old pod was as good a framework as any for a first home in the sea—and it was cheap, a good thing given their nonexistent budget.

  The pod was delivered to the New London submarine base and sat in a vacant lot near the escape training tank, down by the Thames River. Bob Barth and a few other industrious volunteers were among those who spent a few months doing improvised hacking and welding in their spare time. It did not go as well as they had hoped. Looking over the botched structure one day, Mazzone grabbed a black marker and scrawled on its side: “Bond’s Folly—Sealab I.” The pod didn’t survive their remodel attempt, but the name “Sealab” did.

  In early December 1963, three months after the successful two-hundred-foot Genesis E experiment, and just a couple of weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, Bob Barth got a call from Captain Bond. Barth was visiting his parents in the Florida Panhandle and Bond asked him to drive over to meet him at the Navy Mine Defense Laboratory, a base at Panama City situated around an inlet of St. Andrew Bay called Alligator Bayou. The reason, Barth learned, was to inspect a pair of old minesweeping floats, two hollow steel cylinders shaped like torpedoes that were big enough to stand in and nearly sixty feet long. The surplus hulks were in the base’s salvage yard and easily the largest objects in the scattered purgatory of spare parts. As they strolled around, Bond explained to Barth that workers at the Mine Defense Lab were somehow going to transform the floats into America’s first undersea habitat. Formal Navy approval was coming soon. Barth also learned that he would be part of the first crew to live in it.