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JOHN F KENNEDY: To a surprising extent, the sea has remained a mystery. We know less of the ocean of our feet, where we came from, than we do of the sky above our head.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
That is President John F. Kennedy, speaking in 1963. It was an age of exploration. While NASA was on the front pages trying to put a man on the moon, the Navy was quietly conducting tests to see if humans could live and work on the deep-sea floor, with the goal of someday possibly building colonies under the sea. They trained a group of men to be aquanauts, including the astronaut Scott Carpenter. After a successful experiment in the Caribbean, in 1965, the aquanauts set out to live in an undersea habitat 200 feet below the surface off the California coast for more than a month. Producer Sarah Kate Kramer and the Radio Diaries team bring us the story of Sealab.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: This is Commander M. Scott Carpenter, who is America's only astronaut aquanaut. With other divers, he's beginning an experiment that will test man's ability to live and work in the sea. Called Sealab...
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KRIS STOEVER: My name is Kris Stoever. My father was Scott Carpenter, a Project Mercury astronaut, and he was fascinated by the sea. It's sort of the opposite of space exploration. In an interview, my dad said, Sealab is not bright and shiny. It was dark. It was cold. It was dangerous.
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SCOTT CARPENTER: Work In the deep water is just not as glorious a pursuit in the minds of most people as a flight to the moon, for instance. You can't see very far. You can't go down and take pictures that thrill the world.
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STOEVER: But it was a mission that he believed in. For him, the nearness of the ocean, you know, it's right there, and we don't know anything about it.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Attention - all personnel to the Sealab area for a lowering...
BEN HELLWARTH: My name is Ben Hellwarth. I'm the author of a book called "Sealab." Sealab basically looked like kind of a cigar-shaped vessel, like a submarine with legs like a dinner table on it so it can be propped up on the ocean floor.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: The counterweight is in position.
HELLWARTH: Captain George Bond, the man who was responsible for the Sealab program, is standing on the Navy barge that's serving as a kind of mother ship.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: Captain Bond, what is the purpose of all this?
GEORGE BOND: The purpose is to determine whether man can exist on the ocean bottom for the purpose of exploitation and exploration. And I'm just very happy to be on a new frontier.
HELLWARTH: George Bond's idea was we could have these sea bases where divers would have shelter and have access 24/7 to the sea floor, much like a space station in space.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: Sealab control, I hear you loud and clear. Congratulations.
HELLWARTH: The first aquanauts enter the sea lab. That's kind of a huge deal. At this point in diving history, rarely would anyone stay at a substantial depth for more than half an hour. And then Bond came up with this concept of saturation diving, which was basically, if we allow a diver to stay at a depth or a pressure long enough, at a certain point, it wouldn't matter if he stayed down an hour or a week or a month. The decompression is going to be the same. But that was a pretty far-out notion. How deep can a diver go? How long can a diver stay down? No one knew.
RICHARD BLACKBURN: I'm Richard Blackburn. They called me Blackie. And I was an aquanaut in Sealab. None of this had ever been done before. We all felt like we were their lab rats, but we were all young, foolish, gung-ho and thought we were invincible.
HELLWARTH: Inside the habitat, they basically are in what would feel like a recreational vehicle - a toilet, a shower with hot water pumped in from the surface. They've stocked the inside of Sealab - like bread for sandwiches and cans of Chef Boyardee. They also had a closed-circuit TV set up so that those at the surface could kind of watch what was happening.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #6: We have your picture.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #7: Smile. You're on candid camera.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #8: (Helium-altered voice) Hell, yes (ph).
HELLWARTH: You can't breathe ordinary air at certain depths because air is four-fifths nitrogen, and nitrogen, it turned out, caused a kind of drunken effect when you breathe it at depth.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #9: (Helium-altered voice) I said, we're not going to...
HELLWARTH: Helium had been found to be a good substitute. And so, as you can hear, they all sound like some falsetto version of Donald Duck.
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CARPENTER: (Singing in helium-altered voice) Goodnight, Irene. Goodnight, Irene. I'll guess you're...
STOEVER: My dad - he had the ukulele, and he decided to sing in his helium-altered voice.
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CARPENTER: (Singing in helium-altered voice) ...In my dreams. It's Saturday night...
HELLWARTH: I should say that deep sea diving is dangerous all the time anytime. You've got the pressure, the gas recipes, the temperature of the water, the currents, the creatures who may be around. If you were to surface too quickly, your insides would be like a shaken soda can that got popped open. Bubbles would emerge everywhere, and you'd be dead before you reached the surface.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #10: Dictating, dictating - 8:30, 12 September, 1965.
HELLWARTH: So the idea for Sealab was you're living in this pressurized atmosphere, and you are free to come and go from this environment as you please through a hatch that's left open in the floor. The water does not rush in because the pressure inside is the same as the water pressure outside. The divers would tell you they had a blast.
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BLACKBURN: We got up every morning and went into the ocean. You felt that you were at home, and the water was your friend. It got to be where you really wanted to be in the water more than you wanted to be on land, 'cause it was so much more peaceful and so much more beautiful.
STOEVER: My dad was willing to be a guinea pig, gathering information about what happens to the human body under duress. He felt there's value in pushing yourself to the very extreme. What can human beings do?
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BOND: Scott, can you come up on your scrambler again, please?
HELLWARTH: Scott Carpenter lived and worked for a month straight on the bottom - 30 days. That was completely off the charts at the time - a human body surviving at that depth and pressure for that long. And so Sealab was considered a success. George Bond wants to get Carpenter on the phone with Lyndon Johnson, the president of the United States.
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CARPENTER: (Helium-altered voice) One, two three, four, five. How do you roll that, operator?
UNIDENTIFIED OPERATOR: There you are, sir.
LYNDON B JOHNSON: Scott, do you read me all right?
CARPENTER: (Helium-altered voice) Yes, sir, Mr. President. Heard you loud and clear.
JOHNSON: Scott, I'm mighty glad to hear from you. You 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: (Helium-altered voice) Well, thank you very much. There are a lot of other people who bring us over...
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HELLWARTH: Living underwater, now this is not just science fiction. This is a real thing. We could have these sea bases for military purposes, for scientific purposes, for exploration. This opens up the door to all sorts of possibilities.
KELLY: In 1969, the Navy began its most ambitious Sealab experiment, placing a habitat at a depths beyond the limits of what many believe possible.
BLACKBURN: Six hundred feet - that's a quantum leap. You try to foresee any problems, but of course, there is a lot of unforeseen problems that you can't predict.
KELLY: We continue our story about Sealab elsewhere on the program, and you can hear the full version on the Radio Diaries podcast.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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