How Did Sealab Work?

In the 1960s, advances in technology allowed brave aquanauts to explore deeper into the ocean than ever before, but the project was shut down. Learn how Sealab worked -- and how that technology is still used today -- in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain stuff from how stuff works, Hey, brain stuff,
laurin bubble bom here. Even though around seventy of our
planet is covered in salt water, we have a better
map of Mars than we do of the oceans that
sustain virtually every living thing on Earth. Sure, ocean exploration
is expensive and complicated, but so is space exploration, and

(00:22):
we do plenty of that. There was a time, though,
during the early years of space exploration, that aquanauts were
pushing the limits of how deep humans could dive under
the ocean and how long they could stay down there.
Sea Lab, a program launched by the U. S. Navy
in nineteen sixty four, was intended to figure out how
to send divers down into the freezing, high pressure environments
of the deep sea for longer periods of time than

(00:44):
anyone had ever thought possible, and the program was a
big success until it wasn't anymore. It's always challenging to
get a human body free swimming at any great depth,
of the reason being that our bodies are not made
to withstand millions of gallons of water being piled on
top of us. Divers have to breathe pressurized air, which
contains inert gases nitrogen mainly, that dissolve into the bloodstream

(01:06):
and tissues, which works out great so long as the
weight of the entire ocean keeps them compressed. If a
diver wants to come up to the surface, they must
do it slowly in order to avoid the gases making
little bubbles in their blood, migrating to their joints and
causing decompression sickness sometimes called the bends, which is unspeakably
painful and sometimes fatal. In the early nineteen sixties, a

(01:27):
Navy physician named George Bond figured out how to let
people explore the ocean in a new way through a
technique called saturation diving. In his laboratory experiments, Bond was
able to saturate the blood with inert gases like helium
in such a way that divers could not only go deep,
they could stay down indefinitely so long as they had
the right set up and a shelter. Divers could become
acclimated to a habitat two hundred feet that's sixty below

(01:49):
the surface, and free dive even deeper from there. We
spoke with Ben Hellworth, the author of Sea Lab America's
Forgotten Quest to live and work on the ocean floor.
He described it this way. Dr Bond's breakthroughs were a
little bit like the diving equivalent of breaking the sound barrier.
It was a quantum leap in technology over what the
diving parameters had been for more than a century. Sea

(02:12):
Lab one, the first iteration of the Sea Lab experiment,
was housed in a steel tube fifty seven feet long
that's about seventeen meters that was lowered onto the ocean
floor off the coast of Bermuda in July nineteen sixty
four at a depth of a hundred and ninety two
feet that's about fifty nine Four men successfully stayed submerged
in this pod for eleven days, and the experiment went
so well that Sea Lab two was submerged off the

(02:34):
coast of California at a depth of two hundred and
five feet that's sixty two mems in August of the
next year. Sea Lab two had hot showers, a refrigerator,
and a dolphin named Tuffy trained to deliver supplies and
rescue aquanuts if necessary. After a thirty days stay in
Sea Lab two, aquanut and astronauts Scott Carpenter spoke to
President Lyndon Johnson from his helium atmosphere decompression chamber, sounding

(02:56):
like a cartoon chipmunk. He might have sounded ridiculous, but
his three was made. He had survived a month at
a pressure of one and three p s I, which
is seven times that of Earth's atmosphere. President Johnson told Carpenter,
I want you to know that the nation is very
proud of you. Only a few years later, though, a
fatal accident on Sea Lab three, which was situated on
the sea floor off the coast of California at a

(03:18):
depth of six hundred feet that's a hundred and eighty
three meters, would shut the program down. Hellworth said most
people involved were aware that this was a dangerous operation.
They always knew. It had been Sea Lab one and
Sea Lab two had gone well with no major injuries.
After the tragedy on Sea Lab three, they all expected
to press on, but the Navy didn't see it that way,
so the program was canceled. It was still a low

(03:39):
profile enough program that there wasn't a national uproar about
giving up the race to the bottom of the ocean
that you would expect if they had tried to cancel
the Space program two years earlier after the Apollo one
launch pad fire that killed three astronauts. I think everyone
expected the program to go on, but for various reasons,
it didn't. We still use the technical breakthroughs George Bond
pioneered with the Sea Lab program, mostly in the oil industry,

(04:01):
setting up oil platforms. Saturation divers can go to a
job site hundreds of feet below the surface and stay
down there for an entire eight hour shift. It's a
dangerous job, but it can pay around fourteen hundred dollars
a day. Most of us have those saturation divers to
thank for the fuel in our gas tanks. But George
Bond's vision was not just industrial, it was military and
civilian and scientific. He solved the problem of going deeper

(04:24):
and staying longer. But after Sea Lab was canceled, it
turned out the industry is where the money was. Any
military application equipping military submarines to release saturation divers as
spies during the Cold War, for instance, would be highly
classified and therefore are hard to document. But there is
one place on Earth where a Sea Lab type facility
still exists for scientific research, the Aquarius Reef base south

(04:46):
of the Florida Keys, and it's been an operation for
over twenty years. Scientists can go down there sixty feet
that's eighteen meters below the surface and live anywhere from
a few days to a couple of weeks running experiments
on the reef. Hellworth said Dr Bond's vision was science related.
He thought we ought to have sea lab like bases
set up in the ocean wherever there might be something
of interest to study and observe. We should get to

(05:08):
know that environment better because there's value to spending time
in the ocean, just like there was value in Jane
Goodall's being able to sit and observe in the jungle.
Once you're down there and can stay a while, you
really don't know what you're going to see. That's how
we discover things. Today's episode was written by Jesceline Shields
and produced by Tyler Clang for iHeart Media and How

(05:30):
Stuff Works. For more in this and lots of other
pressurized topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com.