MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Now, we continue our story from Radio Diaries about the Navy's Sealab program. As we heard elsewhere on today's show, back in the 1960s, the Navy built a series of underwater habitats under the leadership of Captain George Bond. It also trained a group of men called aquanauts to live in those habitats. When our story left off, the Navy had successfully operated a Sealab 205 feet below sea level. A few years later, 1969, it was building its most ambitious undersea habitat yet. This Sealab would be 610 feet below - 610 - in the cold waters off the California coast.
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BARRY SIMMONS: Barry Simmons from Channel 10, San Diego. Captain Bond, would you cite some of the achievements of this experiment for us?
GEORGE BOND: Well, I suppose that something had started in the face of cries that this is madness - you're wasting your time and the Navy's time. Today, we have demonstrated operationally that this can be done.
BEN HELLWARTH: The deeper you go, the more complicated it gets for the health of the human body. Every 33 feet, you add another atmosphere worth of pressure. So 66 feet, 2 atmospheres, 99 feet, 3 atmospheres, and so on, down to the bottom of the sea.
My name is Ben Hellwarth. I'm the author of a book called "Sealab."
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Mono (ph) control, this is capsule 2 for communications check.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: Here at the experiment site, Sealab is lowered into the ocean.
RICHARD BLACKBURN: I'm Richard Blackburn - they call me Blackie - and I was an aquanaut in Sealab. The morning of the dive, we got everything ready to go, and then we found out that the lab was leaking.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: OK, I'd like to get all members of Team 1 over here.
HELLWARTH: So the lab is leaking, but OK, we can still do this, is the feeling, by getting the aquanauts down there and having them attend to the leaks.
BLACKBURN: Now they started the lowering process to get us to the bottom. It took about an hour.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: With their elevator on the ocean floor, aquanauts Barth and Cannon head for the habitat. The light helium-oxygen atmosphere of Sealab is bubbling out into the sea.
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BLACKBURN: Bob and Barry swam out to the lab. Barry had the responsibility - fix that electrical problem. At the same time, Bob was trying to push the hatch open. And then, all of a sudden, we hear a scream, and John and I look at each other and say, what is that?
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: He sees his partner, Barry Cannon, in trouble on the ocean floor.
BLACKBURN: When I reached Barry, his mouthpiece was floating above his head. I tried to jam it into his mouth. I couldn't get it in. So I went arm over arm, and the three of us were able to pick him up and get him in a diving bell. I gave him mouth-to-mouth, but as the time went on, he got colder and colder and colder. And we gently as possibly laid him out on a bunk, closed his eyes, and we all just sat there and looked at each other.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Good evening. A civilian U.S. aquanaut taking part in the nation's most ambitious underwater living experiment to date died today in water 600 feet deep off the Southern California coast. The Navy says it will suspend diving operations until it's known exactly what happened.
HELLWARTH: After Barry Cannon's death, there was this investigation to try to assess blame, figure out what went wrong. And ultimately, the Navy decided to abandon Sealab altogether and quietly canceled the program. Certainly, the Navy divers were all greatly disappointed.
BLACKBURN: I mean, it was depressing. I would like to have seen the Sealab program go on, but that wasn't a priority for the big picture.
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HELLWARTH: George Bond's dream that you should be able to house people in the oceans, that vision kind of died with Sealab.
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SIMMONS: Captain Bond, is it possible, sometime in the far-distant future, that we may have cities under the sea or things like that?
BOND: I don't predict that we will have cities, but I think we will have colonies of people living on the ocean bottom year-round.
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HELLWARTH: And nowadays, we know things about galaxies billions of light-years away, but there's huge swaths of the ocean that are unexplored. There's still a lot of mystery to it.
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SIMMONS: Well, good luck to you in the Sealab. That's it for now. Thanks very much for joining us, and until next time, good evening.
KELLY: The saturation diving techniques pioneered by Sealab were later used by the Navy for undersea espionage during the Cold War. Many of the aquanauts went on to work as saturation divers in the oil industry's offshore drilling projects.
This story was produced by Sarah Kate Kramer and the team at Radio Diaries. To hear the complete story, you can check out the Radio Diaries podcast.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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