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  After all the hours spent in experimental chambers, Barth was more than happy to try living on the ocean floor. There would still be plenty of poking and prodding as part of the continuing physiological studies, but he would be free to come and go from his home in the sea, living out a genuine Jules Verne fantasy. Barth’s experience as a diver and as the original saturation diving guinea pig made him a logical choice as a first habitat resident. Captain Bond would find four others to join him. Of the four, one man seemed to come from out of the blue, although Barth certainly recognized his name. The whole world knew his name. Less than two years had passed since he had become a national hero as the second American to orbit the earth. He was Malcolm Scott Carpenter, a Project Mercury astronaut who wanted to become an “aquanaut,” as Captain Bond liked to call a saturation diver equipped to live in the sea. Bond would now have his own celebrity diver, and he’d been sent by the original celebrity diver himself, Jacques Cousteau.

  Like so many others, Carpenter had followed Cousteau’s writings and films. The American space hero considered the French explorer a hero, and not long after Carpenter’s historic orbit he met Cousteau at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they were both attending an event. Carpenter took the opportunity to express his interest in the Conshelf experiments and offer his services. He had some experience with scuba and told Cousteau that he might be able to channel some valuable NASA know-how into Conshelf if he could join the French team. Carpenter also knew he had a fear of the deep ocean, and he wanted to overcome it. Cousteau said that he couldn’t pay much, expressed concern that Carpenter didn’t speak French, and suggested that Carpenter look into working with his own Navy. Until then, Carpenter had never heard of Captain George Bond or the new project the Navy was calling Sealab. The name Mazzone scrawled on the survival pod had attained official status, although it’s not quite clear how. “Sealab” certainly made as much sense as any name, and had a purposeful, pioneering ring to it.

  Carpenter was lent back to the Navy in the spring of 1964, just in time to train in Panama City with the Sealab team. The publicity value in adding an astronaut to the Sealab roster was obvious, although Barth wondered what someone with scant diving experience could bring to the program. But Bond wanted Carpenter, and they would train him. If Carpenter could pull off a feat like orbiting the globe, he could probably get along all right on the sea floor.

  Carpenter was self-confident, competent, unflappable—making the cut to become one of the seven Project Mercury astronauts was ample proof of his personal qualifications. But Carpenter knew he would have to prove himself to Barth and the rest of the divers at the Panama City base. Even though Carpenter had a long list of lifetime hobbies and achievements—horseback riding, skiing, wrestling, gymnastics, studying engineering, flying planes, getting launched into space—Barth and some of the other divers couldn’t resist doing a little hazing of their new recruit. They had an arsenal of pranks to choose from, like sneaking up on the spaceman and shutting off his air valve, or tugging on his face mask so it filled with water. Carpenter took it all in stride.

  What Carpenter ultimately found most startling was how underfunded the Sealab program was, especially compared to the space program. The new undersea project was being run by the Office of Naval Research, an agency formed after World War II to coordinate the funding and developing of projects for possible Navy use. The ONR budget for Sealab was a relatively measly $200,000, and in early 1964 engineers at the Mine Defense Lab got word from ONR that they would have three months and about $35,000 to create a Sealab habitat out of those old floats in the salvage yard. There were few specific guidelines—the Navy had never built anything quite like this. The engineers were not divers themselves, so they solicited suggestions from Bond, Mazzone, and others to come up with a viable prototype for the inaugural U.S. quest to live in the sea. Mazzone, in his usual energetic fashion, had been shuttling between the New London submarine base and the Harvard School of Public Health, where he was earning a master’s degree in environmental physiology to better serve the cause.

  From his office window at the base, Bond could see Sealab being pieced together on a sun-splashed tarmac at the water’s edge. By the time Carpenter arrived in the spring of 1964, the two old floats had been cut up and welded together to form a forty-foot-long, cigar-shaped capsule, nine feet in diameter. The capsule stood about five feet off the ground on four pairs of angled struts. The struts connected to two parallel troughs as a support base, like the pontoons on a seaplane, except that these pontoons were open at the top. When the time came, they could be filled with the ballast needed to sink the hollow Sealab and hold it securely on the bottom. The lab looked like a giant insect and stood out even more after it was painted a radiant orange. On either side were two small portholes and the name SEALAB I painted boldly in black, the roman numeral optimistically suggesting that more labs would follow.

  To cut costs, Mine Defense Lab engineers bought quite a few fixtures from Sears instead of from Navy stockpiles—dehumidifiers, electric heaters, a hot plate, an intercom system, and a thermoelectric refrigerator. The engineers wanted to avoid an ordinary fridge cooled by Freon because any leak of the deadly gas could poison the Sealab atmosphere. To select the best conduit for fresh water, several varieties of hose were filled with drinking water, then laid out on the tarmac to bake in the Gulf sun. A Sears garden hose was the cheapest and provided the best-tasting water. The hose would become one strand in a thick umbilical bundle, a lifeline of communication cables, power, and gas lines linking the habitat with its support ship.

  No one in Bond’s camp was complaining about the need for penny-pinching. They had made a quantum fiscal leap from the days of out-of-pocket expenses for sub-rosa animal tests. An improved national attitude toward ocean exploration didn’t hurt their cause, either. Shortly before President Kennedy’s historic May 1961 speech in which he set the nation’s sights on the moon, he asked Congress to nearly double the budget for ocean research and to spend more than $2 billion over the next decade on “the Earth’s ‘inner space.’” As Kennedy said: “Knowledge of the oceans is more than a matter of curiosity. Our very survival may hinge upon it.” Two years later, after the Thresher sinking jump-started a review of the nation’s deep-sea capabilities, Kennedy addressed the National Academy of Sciences at Constitution Hall in Washington: “We know less of the oceans at our feet, where we came from, than we do of the sky above our heads. It is time to change this, to use to the full our powerful new instruments of oceanic exploration, to drive back the frontiers of the unknown in the waters which encircle our globe.”

  Despite the inspiring words, Sealab was not showered with money, and the whole project might have become little more than Bond’s folly if not for an unsolicited push from an obscure figure in the Office of Naval Research, Captain Lewis Melson. Melson came up through the ranks of naval engineers and was more than a little miffed when he got orders to head ONR’s Naval Applications Group. His assignment to the Office of Naval Research meant that he would be further removed from the kind of practical shipyard work he preferred. But Melson followed orders and went to Washington in late August 1963, when Bond was getting started on Genesis E.

  In his new job heading the Naval Applications Group, Melson looked for whatever fruits of research seemed ripe enough to be transformed into practical tools for useful work. He decided to act on an idea that occurred to him a year earlier, after he had witnessed Typhoon Karen’s trashing of Guam’s Apra Harbor. Winds of nearly two hundred miles an hour had left a multimillion-dollar mess that required raising a dozen sunken ships from depths of about a hundred feet. As head of ship repair, Melson saw firsthand how time-consuming and cumbersome conventional diving could be—so many dives, such brief bottom times. The Navy ought to have better ways of getting work done underwater, he thought. Now, at ONR, he had an opportunity to do something about it. Melson put his top engineer, Henry A. “Al” O’Neal, in charge of creating a project that would ma
ke divers into more efficient, effective, and therefore useful underwater workers.

  Melson tried to gain the support of the Navy “diving establishment,” as he scornfully called it—essentially the same skeptics Bond encountered—but found little interest. Neither Melson nor O’Neal was a diver, which may have caused some Navy brass to doubt them, but soon O’Neal found out about Captain Bond and Genesis and invited Bond to Washington. Melson still had doubts. On one hand, Bond was a good doctor and an advocate for taking diving to new depths and durations. But when Melson heard of Bond’s unorthodox ways, he tried to recruit Dr. Workman instead. Workman’s boss at the Experimental Diving Unit wouldn’t let him go and Melson decided to take his chances with Captain Bond as the medical officer and “principal investigator” for the Office of Naval Research project to be called Sealab.

  Melson got the blessing of his ONR superiors to proceed with Sealab, and Jim Wakelin, the influential Navy secretary for research and development, lent his support and asked for regular progress reports. The bureaucratic blessings did not add up to much of a budget, however, so Melson and O’Neal pooled funds from other projects, estimating that about $200,000 would be needed to complete the job.

  May 16 was Armed Forces Day and although the lab wasn’t quite ready for its inaugural dip, they put Sealab I on view during the Mine Defense Lab’s open house. Captain Bond stood on the tarmac in the hot sun fielding questions as visitors trotted up the stairs set up so they could take a peek into the portholes. A few thousand people got a look at America’s prototype sea dwelling that day, although this first public display was more like a county fair sideshow than the unveiling of a pioneering vessel worthy of write-ups in newspapers across the land.

  Within a week, and only a few weeks behind schedule, Sealab I was ready to undergo its first tests at sea. After adding enough ballast to sink the buoyant thirty-ton lab so that only its top half broke the surface, they towed it to a designated site a couple of miles from the glittering white sands of the Panama City shoreline. Bobbing along the surface the lab looked like a bright orange whale chasing after the tugboat that pulled it into the Gulf of Mexico. The support ship that would serve as Sealab’s mission control was there, moored just as it would be during the actual experiment. It was a big ship, almost the length of a football field, fifty feet wide and boxy like an ocean freighter. Its deck, largely flat and open, was about two stories above the waterline. The ship was officially called the YFNB-12, the Navy designation for a steel-covered lighter, but before long the Sealab crew was calling it “Your Friendly Navy Barge.” Built at the end of World War II as a freight barge, it had been modified several times and with some further modifications it would do the job—and it fit the budget.

  Support divers and riggers attached Sealab to the barge by a line that ran from a large windlass down the middle of the ship, over the fantail and through a pulley at the stern. It was as if the barge were acting as a giant, floating fishing pole, reeling out the thick line to the lab in the water. The entry hatch in the belly of the lab—about the size of a manhole, through which the divers could freely pass into and out of the sea—was open, allowing the sea to form a small pool in the floor as it had in the Conshelf habitats. As the lab went deeper, the crew raised the internal pressure to keep the sea from rushing in, but lowering a large, buoyant habitat wasn’t easy.

  As Sealab was being lowered and the barge rose and fell on the passing swells, the thick line to the lab stretched. The combined effect of the stretching line and the bobbing barge caused a persistent yo-yoing and they lost control of the descent. The lab flooded and crash-landed about sixty feet down. Bond feared that they had just sunk the whole program. Lieutenant Commander Roy Lanphear, whom Melson had put in charge of Sealab operations, was summoned to Washington and the project was effectively threatened with termination. The fate of Sealab I was hanging by a hair, Lanphear reported upon his return, and skeptical authorities wondered whether this experiment in undersea living was safe. The Navy Department allowed the project to continue, but any further mishap could be their last.

  The team raised Sealab to the surface and towed it back to the Mine Defense Lab. Within a few days the soggy lab was cleaned, dried, and readied for further tests. The next descent was more dignified. The crew raised and lowered the lab a couple of times for good measure. It was then left on the bottom overnight, about sixty feet down, to make sure everything was working properly and that there were no gas leaks of the sort that had forced Ed Link to cut his cylinder experiment short—or that had kept Mazzone hopping with monkey shit.

  Following the preliminary tests in the Gulf, Sealab I was lifted onto the YFNB-12 and shipped more than a thousand miles to the U.S. Naval Base in Bermuda, the chosen base of operations for the actual experiment. From there, after further preparations, the ultimate destination would be about twenty-seven miles southwest of the British colony and nearly two hundred feet below the surface. The site was selected in part for its relatively warm and clear water. Most of the ocean depths are much colder, and shrouded in greater darkness, but that added challenge could wait. For this maiden trial, keeping five men on the bottom alive and well for three weeks would be challenge enough.

  For an operation whose essential mission was to make a convincing case for saturation diving and sea dwelling—and to avoid major mishaps and Keller-style catastrophes—Sealab seemed to be tempting fate. It would be placed at the northern tip of what had become known as the Bermuda Triangle. This 500,000-square-mile expanse of ocean between Bermuda, Miami, and Puerto Rico had also earned the epithet of the Devil’s Triangle after a century of mysterious disappearances of sailing ships and, more recently, aircraft. In December 1945 six Navy planes inexplicably vanished in good weather during a routine training mission out of the naval air station at Fort Lauderdale. The fully equipped rescue plane sent out after them also vanished without a trace. One member of the Navy panel that investigated said: “They vanished as completely as if they had flown to Mars.” A year before Sealab arrived, a pair of four-engine jets disappeared on a refueling mission in the area. Probable debris turned up about 260 miles southwest of Bermuda—along the route to Sealab’s destination—but that only deepened the mystery of the planes’ true fate.

  Yet if God intended man to have Dominion over the Seas, why fear diving in the Devil’s Triangle? Ed Link had also set his sights on Bermuda for an ambitious attempt at a saturation dive to four hundred feet. Link wrapped up his work with the Deep Submergence Systems Review Group at the beginning of 1964 and sailed Sea Diver from the icy Navy Yard on to Key West and warmer climes. In anticipation of this next, much deeper saturation dive, he had designed a bare-bones little habitat he called SPID, for Submersible Portable Inflatable Dwelling. Like the cylinder, the SPID was more pup tent than house, not only in size but in design. Link’s creation had a thick, sausage-shaped rubber skin about four feet around and eight feet long that was mounted horizontally on a metallic frame. A hatch in the floor could be kept open to the sea once the interior was pressurized and inflated like a balloon. There was also the steel cylinder from Villefranche, originally envisioned as an elevator for Cousteau’s first undersea house. Link would use the cylinder with his inflatable dwelling.

  Link still paid many expenses out of his own pocket but now had backing from the National Geographic Society and again had the assistance of a Navy ship, the Nahant, this time near Bermuda. The Nahant used its echo sounder to scope out the sea floor but couldn’t find a suitably level site at four hundred feet. The islands of Bermuda are at the top of an extinct volcano and the surrounding bottom of the Atlantic Ocean is irregular, often dropping steeply from coral plateaus straight down to depths of more than twelve thousand feet. Link decided instead to set up his SPID on an undersea plateau much closer to Florida, in the western tip of the Triangle.

  The site was about 150 miles east of Miami at the northeastern end of the Great Bahama Bank. On June 30, the seas were calm as Link prepared to lower his inf
latable dwelling to the ocean floor, just ahead of Sealab. That timing appeared to be more happenstance than the product of an intentional race to the bottom, although the friendly rivalry may have been a contributing factor. Some pesky helium leaks had to be plugged that morning before the rubber tent was put in the water. The two divers rode down inside Link’s cylinder. In addition to Robert Sténuit, the Belgian diver who had spent a day in the cylinder, Link had recruited a celebrity diver of his own—or at least a diver with a celebrated name. He was Jon Lindbergh, the eldest son of aviator Charles Lindbergh. A former Navy diver, Lindbergh had gone into commercial diving and was known for his daring deep-diving exploits on West Coast offshore oil rigs. He bore a noticeable resemblance to his famed father and was affable but considerably more taciturn than his outgoing Belgian counterpart. By early afternoon, Lindbergh and Sténuit were inside Link’s inflatable dwelling, 432 feet down. As Link had announced in London at the Second World Congress, they intended to stay for several days, roaming in and out of their pup tent in the sea.

  A thousand miles away, the Devil’s Triangle was up to its old tricks. On June 29, two U.S. Air Force jets had flown out of Bermuda’s Kindley Air Force Base and collided in midair. This time there were plenty of witnesses and little mystery as to what had happened. Seven airmen survived the collision but seventeen were killed. The Sealab crew got an unexpected assignment: searching for wreckage and bodies.

  Since most of the jet wreckage landed on the floor of the Atlantic at depths down to 250 feet—similar to the planned depth for Sealab—those in charge considered putting Sealab down near the crash site. Bond found the idea tempting indeed. They could do a significant operational job and pointedly demonstrate what he had been preaching for seven years—that saturation diving and undersea living would be the best way to accomplish all kinds of useful underwater work. The accolades that might come from handling an important recovery job would be good for Sealab and generate some favorable headlines. On the other hand, the physiological studies would have to be cut. They wouldn’t be able to run a controlled experiment and focus on their recovery work at the same time. The irregular depths that compelled Link to head for the Bahamas would undoubtedly complicate the process of decompression and also the mooring of the support ship. By adding more variables and unknowns to the operation they could wind up in a situation worse than the flooding at Panama City. Captain Bond pondered the options over a few pipefuls of Sir Walter Raleigh, his preferred tobacco, but in the end, he and several other commanders recommended that they stick with their original plan.